Contents

Introduction
Unit One. Toni Morrison and the Black Female Identity ..4 Unit Two. Salman Rushdie and the Imaginary Homelands ..19 Unit Three. Alice Walker and the Challenge of Identity ..34

Mid-term Assignment 45
Unit Four. Zadie Smith and the Challenge of Multiculturalism 46 Unit Five. J.M. Coetzee: Denouncing the Brute Force ..54 Unit Six. Jean Rhys: Voicing the Silent .64

Introduction

The present course deals with some representative contemporary postcolonial writers in English. The choice of the six novelists was a difficult one, given the great numbers of new voices, the variety of the geographical areas and of colonial and postcolonial contexts and types of experience, the multitude of issues included under the umbrella of postcolonial.

Nevertheless the author tried to focus on some representative voices at an international level, most of them winners of significant literary prizes, even Nobel prizes for literature in the last two decades. Another criterion of selection was the range of issues that might illustrate the field of postcolonial studies today. The issues of identity, with its multiple facets, were given priority, but other equally important areas explored in the works of these writers are power relationships and the effects of multicultural societies and of diaspora.

Course Objectives The main objective of the course is to offer an introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial literature, with its priorities, its peculiarities and the forms of discourse it embraces in order to express those areas of human experience that had been silenced or overlooked before. The study of postcolonial literature is therefore expected to result in strengthening critical attitudes and broadening the understanding of the world we live in. The specific competences developed by the course are: Identifying major themes in the field of postcolonial literature Interpreting the novels under scrutiny from the perspective of postcolonial theory and literary criticism Compare treatment of subaltern identities in these novels Analyze literary devices used by postcolonial writers Resources For the understanding of this course and the successful performance of the tasks of each unit students need basic knowledge in literary theory and the theory of postcolonial discourse.

Course Structure The Course in Postcolonial literature is structured in six units, each unit referring to one major novelist who published works in English but represents a different geographical area and therefore a specific colonial / postcolonial experience. Each unit starts with an overview of the life and work of the writer, and continues with a presentation of two or more major novels. The presentations end with some considerations about the relevance of the postcolonial issues appearing in the works analyzed. At the end of each unit there is an Assessment part, and in some of them an example, that is a representative fragment which can be analyzed. There is a mid-term assessment after unit three and an end-of-course assessment. Average Study Time The average study time for the units is two or three hours, including the End of unit tests.

Evaluation The final grade for the course will include a test with 2-3 general questions, amounting to 50%, and the answers to the Assignment tasks representing 50%.

UNIT ONE: Toni Morrison and the Black Female Identity

1.1. Introduction This unit makes an overview of three novels by Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize laureate who throughout her work explored the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. The unique cultural inheritance of the African Americans is reflected in complex narratives using a variety of discourses and the devices of postmodernism.

1.2. Competences On completion of UNIT ONE students will be able to identify the main themes and narrative strategies of Toni Morrisons novels, the plot of the three novels and some postcolonial issues related to the characters and the themes. They will be able to analyze aspects of black female identity and of the African American culture.

Study time for UNIT ONE: 4 hours

1.3. The Life and Work of Toni Morrison Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 in Lorain, Ohio where her parents had moved to escape the problems of southern racism. Her family were migrants, sharecroppers on both sides. Morrison grew up in the black community of Lorain. She spent her childhood in the Midwest and was a voracious reader, fond of Jane Austen and Tolstoy. Morrison's father, George Wofford, told her folktales of the black community which later she used in her works. In 1949 she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C where she changed her name from "Chloe" to "Toni. She continued her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Morrison wrote her thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, receiving her M.A. in 1955. Later she became an editor at Random House and promoted black writers.

Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) while teaching at Howard University and caring for her two children. The story is set in the community of a small, Midwestern town. Its characters are all black. Pecola Breedlove, the central character, prays each night for the blue-eyed beauty of Shirley Temple. She believes everything would be all right if only she had beautiful blue eyes. The narrator, Claudia MacTeer, tries to understand the destruction of Pecola. Sula (1973) depicts two black woman friends and their community of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the lives of Sula, who is considered a threat against the community, and her cherished friend Nel, from their childhood to maturity and to death. The novel won the National Book Critics Award. It was only with the publication of Song of Solomon that Morrison gained international attention. Written from a male point of view, the story dealt with Milkman Dead's efforts to recover his "ancient properties", in a quest for his true identity that leads him to his ancestral roots. In 1988 Morrison received the Pulitzer Prize for the novel Beloved (1987), after an open letter, signed by forty-eight prominent black writers, was published in the New York Time Book Review in January. Beloved was inspired by the true story of a black American slave woman, Margaret Garner. She escaped with her husband Robert from a Kentucky plantation, and sought refuge in Ohio. When the slave masters overcame them, she killed her baby, in order to save the child from the slavery she had managed to escape. In 1992 Morrison wrote the novel Jazz and in 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In her work Toni Morrison has explored the experience and roles of black women in a racist and male dominated society. In the center of her complex and multilayered narratives is the unique cultural inheritance of African-Americans. Morrison has been a member of both the National Council on the Arts and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Wendy Steiner once described Toni Morrison as both a great novelist and the closest thing the country has to a national writer. The fact that she speaks as a woman and a black only enhances her ability to speak as an American (1992, p. 2)

1.4. The Bluest Eye The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrisons first novel and it explores one year in the life of a young black girl named Pecola Breedlove who lives in Lorain, Ohio. The action takes place in the years following The Great Depression. The story is told from the perspective of Claudia MacTeer as a child and an adult, as well as from a third person omniscient viewpoint. It holds as a central concern a critique of Western beauty and its destructiveness when imposed upon people of color in general 5

and black women in particular. The Breedlove family is described as being very ugly and Pecola is constantly aware of her ugliness and begins to wish she possessed blue eyes like Shirley Temple as she associates beauty with whiteness and blue eyes, attributes she cannot in reality possess. Claudia and Frieda MacTeer and their family take Pecola and her father in following the fights between him and his wife. They have lost the love for each other and while she only finds happiness in being a servant for a white family and taking care of a white girl, he only finds happiness in drinking. Claudia MacTeer, as opposed to Pecola rejects the Western values of beauty. Whenever she receives white dolls with blonde hair and blue eyes she tears them apart and wishes instead for a doll that looks like her, a little black doll. She rejects external standards that she cannot meet while Pecola internalizes such values. Cholly Breedlove, her father, abandoned when he was four days-old by his mother and rejected by his father does not know how to love and the only way he can express his love towards his daughter, Pecola is to rape her. He flees after she becomes pregnant and the entire town of Lorain turns against her, except for Claudia and Frieda which give up the money they had been saving and plant flower seeds in the hope that if the marigolds bloom, Pecolas baby will live. In the end, Pecolas child is born prematurely and dies and the flowers never bloom. The novel begins with Claudia stating that the marigolds did not bloom in the summer of 1941, giving a naturalistic interpretation of the events to follow. In an article entitled Storytelling and Moral Agency written by Lynne Tirell that appeared in an anthology of critical texts on Morrisons work (Toni Morisons Fiction: Contemporay Criticism edited by David L. Middleton), the question of storytelling being necessary to moral agency arises. In The Bluest Eye Morrison shows how moral sensitivity may emerge from a text without being explicit, with no invocation of moral rules or ideals or final judgments of moral culpability. The moral sensitivity emerges from the telling of the story. The reader him/herself is the one who can draw conclusions about the imposing notion of beauty forced by the Western tradition or about how wrong the black community was for not nurturing a 12 year-old girl raped by her father, not wishing for her baby to live. To achieve this distancing effect, Morrison uses the first person narrative and third person narrative techniques, the authorial voice belonging to Claudia Macteer who avoids selfexposure and direct interpretation of the events:
The young Claudia feels the injustice of Pecolas plight but she has not learnt to justify her views. The older Claudia, whose prose is justified, tells a more explicitly sociological and psychological story, claiming that Pecola went mad because of the black community that would not sustain her (Tirell, 2000: 19)

From this very first novel, Morrisons intentions are to write a wholly black text, to depict the black self on the white page. Timothy B. Powell in an article published in the above-mentioned anthology describes Morrisons task: 6

The task which lies ahead, to my mind, is to lift the black self out of the hole, to bring black meanings out of the semantic shadows of the Masters language and to affirm these meanings in a medium which can truly be called a black text, a text whose margins are ruled by the black logos. No one, to my mind, has accomplished this more than Toni Morrison (Powell, 2000: 19)

The black logos often had to be hidden in the Masters language and ironically, Morrison begins her first novel in the language of the Master, with an example of the white text from a Dick and Jane reader:
Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play. Who will play with Jane? See the cat. It goes meow-meow. Come and play. Come and play with Jane() (Morrison, 2005: 3).

Each chapter begins with parts of this text and the white standards of happiness that it portrays are contrasted with the harsh reality of Pecola and the black communitys reality. The black community is a minority forced to define itself in terms of the ethnocentrism of the white culture. By looking at themselves through the eyes of the white culture, the Breedlove family loses all notion of their own black identity and that is what happens to many of Morrisons characters who are struggling to find their black identity and to return to their cultural and historical roots. Each of Morrisons novels embraces the theme of the main characters search for identity as Dorothy H. Lee once noted in The Quest for Self: Triumph and Failure in the works of Toni Morrison. It is clear that The Bluest Eye is a novel of failure because Pecola does not find her inner beauty and value and goes mad. Pecola Breedlove and her family feel the acuteness of the white glare, the view from the center of the white eye. Ed. Guerrero dedicates an entire article to the Look in the novels of Toni Morrison. He describes the look as the controlling gaze of a dominant, racially-oppressive society which constructs whiteness as the norm while viewing African Americans as Other. (Guererro,2000: 28). In one episode of the novel, Pecola enters a store to buy Mary Jane candies (again, like the Shirley Temple glass that she always drinks milk out of excessively, the image of the blonde, blue-eyed Mary Jane comforts Pecola who wishes to be like her) and she is subjected to the white gaze of the shopkeeper. She had wondered before entering the store if dandelions are flowers or weeds (if she was a flower or a weed) and after encountering the look she decides that they are ugly weeds after all, just like her. Morrison describes the look in detail in this scene:
He [the shopkeeper] does not see her because for him there is nothing to see. How can a 52 year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss see a little black girl? Nothing in his life even suggested that the feat was possible, not to say desirable or necessary (Morrison, 2005: 41-2).

Ideas of beauty, particularly those that relate to racial characteristics, are a major theme in this book. The title refers to Pecola's wish that her eyes would turn blue. Claudia is given a white baby doll to play with and is constantly told how lovely it is: All the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellowhaired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl treasured (p. 20) Insults to physical appearance are often given in racial terms; a light skinned student named Maureen is a favorite at school just because of her skin color. Pauline Breedlove, Pecolas mother also assigns peoples faces in some category in the scale of absolute beauty after she watches Hollywood films and starts doing her hair like Greta Garbo or Ginger Rogers. The internalization of white standards of beauty and value can only be destructive for the black community. By trying to conform to everyone else's ideas of beauty instead of her own, Pecola never actually obtains what she wants. She thinks blue eyes are beautiful simply because society thinks that blue eyes are beautiful. The goal is unattainable both physically and metaphorically because one cannot achieve beauty unless one achieves his own idea of beauty not what society says is beautiful. The black community must not internalize the outward look and must search for their inner beauty and value and that is what Morrison suggests in this novel.

1.5. Song of Solomon The action of Song of Solomon (1977) takes place in an unnamed Michigan town. The novel begins with the suicide of Robert Smith, an insurance agent who leaps off the roof of Mercy Hospital wearing blue silk wings and claiming that he can fly to the opposite shore of Lake Superior. The following day, Ruth Foster Dead, the daughter of the first black doctor in town gives birth to the first black child born in Mercy Hospital, Milkman Dead (Macon Dead III). When he discovers at age four that people cannot fly, Milkman loses all interest in himself and others. He is loved by his sisters (First Corinthians and Magdalena), his aunt, Pilate, and adored by his lover and cousin, Hagar. He does not appear to love them back and he grows up bored and privileged. In his lack of compassion he resembles his father, Macon Dead II who is a ruthless landlord obsessed with obtaining wealth.

Milkman is affected by a genetic malady, an emotional disease that has its origins in oppressions endured by past generations and transmitted to future ones. His grandfather was killed defending his land and his children were scarred by witnessing his murder and became estranged. At the age of 32, Milkman wants to escape the routine of his life and seeks to find the gold that his father believes his sister Pilate has taken from a cave when they were kids. After he finds bones in her bag, he decides to go to Michigan, his hometown in the South to find the gold. Discovering that there is no gold, he begins searching for his long-lost family history. He heads South to Shalimar, his grandfathers ancestral home in Virginia. He is unaware that he is followed by Guitar, his friend who wants to 8

murder him because he thinks he has the gold and does not want to share it with him (he needs the gold to sponsor his organization, Seven Days, a secret society that avenges injustices committed against African-Americans by murdering innocent whites).

Milkman uncovers more and more clues about his ancestors: his great-grandfather was the legendary flying African, Solomon who escaped slavery by flying back to Africa. After an unsuccessful attempt to take Jake, his youngest son (Milkmans grandfather) on the flight, Solomon abandoned his wife, Ryna and their twenty-one children. Ryna, his wife went crazy and left Jake to be raised by Hetty, an Indian woman whose daughter Sing, he married. He hears the children singing the Song of Solomon. The name Solomon seems to follow him: Solomons General Store, Luther Solomon, Solomons Leap. His familys history is hidden within the song. He returns to Shalimar with Pilate to bury his grandfathers bones. Pilate is accidentally shot by Guitar who was aiming for Milkman. Milkman calls out Guitars name and leaps towards him. The novel thus ends with the image of flight once more, as it began. By recreating his ancestors action, he reiterates the feeling of freedom from slavery and oppression and feels more exhilarated than ever: For now he knew what Shalimar knew: If you surrendered to the air you could ride it (Morrison, 1998: 337)

The novel begins in a black community in which blackness is still judged by the standards of the white logos, as what Powell described as absence, negation and even evil. Milkman has been marked with the mark of the white logos at birth, given the name Macon Dead III (the name being a mistake made by a white man that understood his grandfathers town of origin and the fact that his father was dead as his name). The black community attempts to signify away the brand by renaming the boy Milkman (because his mother breastfed him for too long). Milkman dreams of

Some ancestor, some lithe young man with onyx skin and legs as straight as cane stalks, who had a name that was real. A name given to him at birth with love and seriousness. A name that was not a joke, nor a disguise, nor a brand name (Morrison, 1998: 17-18)

Morison often uses the name theme in her novels. Slaves would often be given names by their Masters according to their flaws, mistakes, weaknesses or gestures. The names were given with no love and the slaves did not consider them their real names and therefore the community gave nicknames in an attempt to acquire a slice of freedom. True names are indispensible to the sense of identity and in order to know ones real world one should at least know ones true name. In Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon, Guy Wilentz also insists upon the importance of naming as a method of resisting the hegemony of the white society. People kept a secret name so an enemy couldnt use it for evil intent. Naming can be a method of regaining control of ones life, Wilentz also states. Morrison stated that 9

she used biblical names to show the impact of the Bible on black peoples lives but also their ability to distort the Bible for their own purposes.

Morrison was inspired by Faulkner and Joyce when writing Song of Solomon as David Cowart states in an article belonging to the same anthology of texts. Morrison explored the themes of history, identity and freedom. Naming can relate to the first two. Freedom is expressed in her novel through the myth of flight that was also used by James Joyce in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in reference to the Greek myth of Daedalus. For both authors, Cowart states, flight represents an act of cultural definition and the refining of a national ethos but whereas Joyces myth of flight concerns art, Morrisons simply freedom. The novel opens and closes with flying, Robert Smiths flight anticipating Milkmans.

Morrison uses African American folktales, folk songs and legends that are part of African culture in order to reaffirm African identity. She often stated that black people believe in magic. There were many legends about Africans who flew or jumped off ships to escape slavery and fly back to Africa. Pilate is the one who tells Milkman the story, she is the embodiment of the African American woman who passes down stories to future generations:

The tales of the Flying Africans and the stories of endurance and strength in the face of slavery and oppression, as well as the values of the African communities from whence they came, have been encapsulated in the orature of the women (Wilentz, 2000: 114)

Morrison seems to suggest, not only in this novel but in others that the Black woman who is sometimes seen as the Earth Mother, the embodiment of history and traditional values and keeper and transmitter of those values is the true key to how one should place oneself and react to white society and its pressures. Wilentz identifies the two approaches and an alternative to these issues:

The question of identity in a hostile and antagonistic world has been paramount. Often, this search for identity has led to one of two opposite approaches: mainstream assimilation/accommodation or racial separatism. Two characters in the novel illustrate these warring functions: Macon Dead, Milkmans father (assimilation) and Guitar Bains, Milkmans friend (separatism) () Through the characterization of Pilate, a female ancestor, Morrison () [offers] an alternative- perhaps not a reconciliation but a more clearly, articulated dialectic of the double self by the acceptance of ones African values and cultural heritage (Wilentz, 2000: 116).

If The Bluest Eye was a novel of failure, Song of Solomon represents a novel of triumph, as Milkman manages to find his native roots, his true black identity. Milkmans findings give him profound joy and a sense of purpose. Milkman becomes a compassionate, responsible adult. He feels exhilarated, proud with his ancestors and their legacy; he feels the joy of Solomons escape from 10

slavery. Milkman manages to obtain a cultural and historical consciousness and he manages to recuperate from cultural illness through his journey in the South. Again, like in many of Toni Morrisons novels, place is associated with identity. Only by returning to his homeland does Milkman regain his social and cultural identity, his true self. Milkman recovers his cultural identity as an African man. At the end of the novel, Milkman has come to terms with his self and community, achieving transcendence symbolized in literal flight. Dorothy H. Lee describes Milkmans journey in his quest for self:

Figuratively, he travels from innocence to awareness, i.e from ignorance of origins, heritage, identity and communal responsibility to knowledge and acceptance. He moves from selfish and materialistic dilettantism to an understanding of brotherhood () He journeys from spiritual death to rebirth, a direction symbolized by the discovery of the secret power of flight. Mythically, liberation and transcendence follow the discovery of self (Lee, 1985: 353)

Thus, in this novel Morrison successfully achieves to overthrow the white logos and escape the white gaze and manages to draw upon the power of the black logos, inscribing a black reality on the white page.

1.6. Beloved The book, written in 1987 is about Sethe and her daughter Denver who live at 124 Bluestone. The house they inhabit, is haunted by a spiteful ghost. Because of this, Sethe's youngest daughter, Denver, has no friends and Howard and Buglar, Sethe's sons, run away from home by the time they are thirteen. Shortly afterward, Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, dies in her bed. Paul D, one of the slaves from Sweet Home, the plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, Halle and him had worked in arrives at 124. He attempts to restore peace to the house and make Sethe and Denver happy. He chases the ghost away but one day after a carnival, a woman stands near their house, having the distinct features of a baby and calling herself Beloved. Denver recognizes right away that she must be a reincarnation of her sister Beloved. Paul D, suspicious of her, warns Sethe, but Sethe ignores him. Paul D finds himself being gradually forced out of Sethe's home and later forced to have sex with Beloved that makes him remember horrible experiences of the past. Feeling guilty he asks Sethe if she wants to have a baby with him. Stamp Paid tells him why the community rejects Sethe. After escaping from Sweet Home, Sethe is found by Schoolteacher and in a panic, fearing her child will become a slave she kills her baby. Sethe tells Paul D. that she wanted to protect her children. Sethe recognizes in Beloved her murdered child and begins to spend more time with her out of guilt. Beloved becomes angry and more and more demanding. Her presence ends up consuming 11

Sethes life. Denver searches for help from the community and in the end people arrive at 124 and exorcise Beloved. Toni Morrison dedicated this novel to Sixty Million and more referring to the black people who died in the slave trade. Morrison based the novel on real historical events. The Misery or Sethes killing of her baby is inspired by the true story of the 1856 murder by Margaret Garner of her children to prevent them from being recaptured and taken back into slavery with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The Middle Passage is mentioned along with the Underground Railway. The Middle Passage refers to the forcible passage of African people from Africa to the New World, as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Ships departed Europe for African markets with commercial goods, which were in turn traded for kidnapped Africans who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves. The slaves were then sold for raw materials. The Underground Railroad was an informal network of secret routes used by 19th century black slaves in the US to escape to free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists who were sympathetic to their cause. Beloveds appearance in the novel triggers the other characters memories which had long been suppressed. Sethe is inscribed with the discourse of slavery. There have been many slave narratives before but Morrison not only borrows from them but rewrites them. Morrison often remarked the fact that the literary canon must be revised and the unspeakable must be spoken and that is what her characters attempt to do in Beloved. Morrison reinterprets famous American novels and adds what is missing from them. Therefore, in another anthology edited by Nancy J. Peterson (Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches), some critics identify connections between Morrisons work and Woolfs, Twains or Hawthornes. Authors like Hawthorne represent for Morrison the Schoolteacher, the quintessential figure of white male authority, he represents a more extreme version of the opposition the black women writers faced from a literary establishment filled with racial and sexual prejudices. Caroline M Woidat writes in Talking Back to Schoolteacher: Morrisons confrontation with Hawthorne in Beloved:
Americas literary history and its history of slavery cannot be separated. The stance these white authors assumed toward African Americans is intimately related to that of slave owners such as schoolteacher. In Beloved, when a Sweet Home slave tries to talk back, schoolteacher beats him anyway to show him that definitions belong to the definers not the defined (Woidat, 1997: 190)

Hawthorne for instance feared slave abolition because he felt that the unity of the nation had to be preserved at all costs. Morrisons novel is itself an act of talking back, part of her project to create black literature. Authors of slave fictions attempted to create an act of self-definition but they were often compelled to distort their own features or leave things out. Beloved, as opposed to 12

Hawthornes fiction or other slave narratives, focuses upon the aspects of slavery that the 19th century authors tried to conceal. In the novel, Schoolteacher asserts his authority by controlling language (which has been equated by Foucault to power). In the end of the novel, the Black Word triumphs as the women stand before Sethe singing as they used to do in Baby Suggs time. Morrison uses the power of the language to speak the unspeakable of the previous slave narratives. She doesnt avoid describing the violent acts done to black slaves by whites. She records the realities of black life in America that did not get recorded. She presents images of racist violence:
Eighteen Seventy-Four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes, 87 lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He [Stamp Paid] smelled skin, skin and hot blood (Beloved, 1997: 180)

In Say Make Me, Remake Me: Toni Morrison and the Reconstruction of African-American History, Nancy J. Peterson states that all these violent acts remain visible only because of the black collective memory. Historical rememory is needed in order for the individual to find his own identity. Following individual lives like Sethes, Paul Ds, Stamp Paids closely, makes it possible for Morrison to reconstruct a history that remains faithful to the past. History is never over and it is through the telling and retelling of stories that the individual and community can live their lives at peace. Only when Beloved helps the community confront their past can they regain peace. By exorcising Beloved, the community exorcises the demons of the past that they had long repressed. The concept of rememory is a very important theme is Morrisons works and together with the use of primal scenes it is a device used in all of her novels. Ashraft H. A. Rushdy examines these devices closely in Rememory: Primal Scenes and Constructions in Toni Morrisons novels. The critic gives a very clear definition of primal scenes:
I wish to redefine the primal scene as the critical event (or events) whose significance to the narrated life becomes manifest only at a secondary critical event, when by a preconscious association the primal scene is recalled (Rushdy, 2000: 138)

Primal scenes can be an affective agency for self-discovery which is an aim shared by all of Morrisons main characters. We can find this procedure in movies as well when a memorable sentence or action is delivered at the beginning of the movie and then later on at a critical juncture to demonstrate either ironic or emphatic development. Morrisons novels, Rushdy proves, are especially concerned with how anamnesis serves and conserves a sense of self. Sethe describes this experience: 13

I was talking about time. Its so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But its not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, its gone but the place- the picture of it- stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there in the world() Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think its you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. Its when you bump into a rememory that belongs to someone else (Beloved, 1997: 35-6)

In Sula the context of rememory is that of female friendship, in Song of Solomon of familial relations and in Beloved of a subjugated culture of slaves. Each character in Morrisons novels has a primal scene that is recollected at a crucial moment in his/her life. Understanding self and past however is a project of community, not of the individual so one cannot do it alone. Paul Ds and Sethes primal scenes are joined together. One of Sethes primal scenes is murdering her baby when she sees the slave owners and especially Schoolteacher who tries to demonstrate the subhumanity of blacks. Another primal scene is when her milk gets stolen. The setting of Paul Ds primal scene, seeing Halle at the churn is related to Sethes. The origin of both of their pain is the dominating cultures unwillingness to allow the subjugated culture the right to self-definition, self-discovery, and, when they deem it necessary, self (Rushdy, 2000: 158)

The magic of memory in Morrisons novels is that it connects lives. It must be experienced individually before it becomes communal property. In individual experience memory is painful as Milkman and Sethe find out but in shared experience memory is healing as everyone in Morrisons novels discovers. What Beloved suggests is that tomorrow is only made possible by yesterday and the contemporary African Americans must gain knowledge of the past by imagining what it was like to be their slave ancestors.

1.7. Toni Morrison as a Postcolonial Writer Toni Morrison is a writer of postcolonial literature and she managed to represent postcolonial themes with great skill and imagination in her works. Her novels can be described as African-American, postcolonial, postmodern, often using magic realism but also referring to genuine historical events. Beloved can be seen as a revised slave narrative, a modern slave narrative, as Morrison includes themes that were omitted from previous slave narratives. She uses an Afrocentric discourse and becomes an Afrocentric storyteller. She is inspired by the great African oral tradition imitating orality in her text. She recreates the richness of black speech and uses African-American folktales, folk songs and legends at the core of her novels. She incorporates a device that was present in ancient Greek literature as well: the use of a chorus, the community always making its voice heard 14

and contributing to the individuals story. Morrison uses magic-realism as Africans believe in magic therefore the community is not surprised by a ghost haunting Sethes house, nor is it surprised by a reincarnation of a murdered child. As narrative techniques she uses, apart from the choral note, soliloquies and an omniscient narrator. In her works we always have an inner time that always transforms outer time through memory. Memory is shared and becomes a communal memory. Morrison suggests the power of the Black community that having a long history of oppression manages to keep its traditions and give its members strength to carry on. Morrisons novels are all based on the major postcolonial theme of identity. All her characters attempt to find their identity. Whereas Pecola and Sula fail, Milkman succeeds. Morrison stresses the fact that ones identity can only be found by returning to the past, by finding that connection with ones ancestor. When Milkman finds his origins and finds he is related to the Flying African Solomon, he is reborn and embraces his identity. What all of her characters and the black community in general must learn is that they must move from what DuBois described as double consciousness (when they look at themselves through the eyes of another) to double vision (when they view themselves through their culturally-informed and historically-meaningful perspective). Morrison thus approaches major postcolonial themes like history, identity, ethnic discrimination, racism, alterity, memory. Post-colonial literature works through the process of "writing back", "re-writing", and "re-reading". This means the interpretation of well-known literature from the perspective of the formerly colonized and we have seen that Morrison re-writes some very popular canonical works like Twains Huckleberry Finn, Hawthornes Scarlet Letter while also borrowing themes and symbols from Joyce, Faulkner and reinventing narrative techniques and layered rhythms used by Virginia Woolf in an attempt to write literature that is wholly black. Morrison creates a black text but interestingly enough, although her novels have black protagonists and speak about the black community, there are many aspects and themes that make the novels universally-valid. As Steiner said, Toni Morrison speaks not only as a black and a woman but as an American as well. References: DuBois, W. E. B. (1903) The Souls of Black Folk in Three Negro Classics, New York: Avon Books, 1965, 209-389 Bowers, S. (2000) Beloved and the New Apocalypse in Middleton, David, L. (ed) Toni Morrisons Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, New York & London, Garland Publishing Cowart, D (2000) Faulkner and Joyce in Morrisons Song of Solomon in Middleton, David, L. (ed) Toni Morrisons Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, New York & London, Garland Publishing 15

Guerrero, E. (2000) Tracking the look in the novels of Toni Morrison in Middleton, David, L. (ed) Toni Morrisons Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, New York & London, Garland Publishing Lee, D.H (1985) The Quest for Self: Triumph and Failure in the works of Toni Morrison in Mari Evans (ed) Black Women Writers, Pluto Press Unlimited, Torianno Avenue, London Morrison, T. (1997) Beloved, Vintage, London Morrison, T. (2005) The Bluest Eye, Plume, USA Morrison, T. (1998) Song of Solomon, Vintage, London Peterson. N.J (1997) Say make me, remake me: Toni Morrison and the reconstruction of AfricanAmerican history Nancy J. Peterson (ed) Toni Morrison: Critical and theoretical approaches, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London Powell, T. B. (2000) Toni Morrison: The Struggle to depict the Black figure on the White page in Middleton, David, L. (ed) Toni Morrisons Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, New York & London, Garland Publishing Rushdy, Ashcraft, H. A. (2000) Rememory: Primal scenes and constructions in Toni Morrisons novels in Middleton, David, L. (ed) Toni Morrisons Fiction: Contemporary Criticism, New York & London, Garland Publishing Tirell, L. (2000) Storytelling and moral agency in Middleton, David, L. (ed) Toni Morrisons Fiction : Contemporary Criticism, New York & London, Garland Publishing Torres, R.P. (1997) Knitting and knotting the narrative thread: Beloved as postmodern model in Nancy J. Peterson (ed) Toni Morrison: Critical and theoretical approaches, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London Wilentz, G. (2000) Civilizations Underneath: African Heritage as Cultural Discourse in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon in Middleton, David, L. (ed) Toni Morrisons Fiction : Contemporary Criticism, New York & London, Garland Publishing Woidat, C.M. (1997) Talking back to schoolteacher: Morrisons confrontation with Hawthorne in Beloved in Nancy J. Peterson (ed) Toni Morrison: Critical and theoretical approaches, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/tmorris.htm (20. 04. 2010) 16

1.7. Summary The novels of Toni Morrison combine genuine historical events with the devices of postmodernism and the authors great imaginative skills in order to explore deep issues of identity in postcolonial contexts. They become strong instances of slave narrative, revealing aspects that had never been dealt before. Morrison is also a great master of the Afrocentric discourse and of the great African oral tradition which is valorized in new ways in connection with the main postcolonial themes of history, identity, ethnic discrimination, racism, alterity, memory.

1.8 End of Unit Assessment Answer the following questions: What oppositions does the novel The Bluest Eye reveal? Enumerate some themes and ideas in this novel. How is ancestry presented in Song of Solomon? Analyze the importance of names in the novel. State the importance of African American folktales, songs and legends. Why is Song of Solomon a novel of triumph? Analyze the meaning of rememory in Beloved. Present briefly the plot of Beloved. Why is Toni Morrison a postcolonial writer?

Example

Analyse the following fragment from the novel Beloved and point out the postcolonial issues it reveals, as well as Morrisons techniques: Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I dont have to explain a thing. I didnt have time to explain before because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be. But my love was tough and she back now. I knew she would be. Paul D ran her off so she had no choice but to come back to me in the flesh. I bet you Baby Suggs, on the other side, helped. I wont never let her go. Ill explain to her, even though I 17

dont have to. Why I did it. How if I hadnt killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her. When I explain it shell understand, because she understands everything already. Ill tend her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else and the one time I did it was took from me they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby. Nan had to nurse white babies and me too because Maam was in the rice. The little white babies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left. Ill tell Beloved about that; shell understand. She my daughter. The one I managed to have milk for and to get it to her even after they stole it; after they handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses. But I wasnt too nasty to cook their food or take care of Mrs. garner. I tended her like I would have tended my own mother if she needed me Oh, but thats all over now. Im here. I lasted. And my girl come home. Now I can look at things again because shes here and see them too. After the shed, I stopped. Now, in the morning, when I light the fire, I mean to look out the window to see what the sun is doing to the day. Does it hit the pump handle first or the spigot? See if the grass is gray-green or brown or what. Now I know why Baby Suggs pondered color her last years. She never had time to see, let alone enjoy it before. (Toni Morrison Beloved. London:Vintage, 1997, pp.200-201).

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UNIT TWO: Salman Rusdie and the Imaginary Homeland

2.1. Introduction This unit introduces one of the greatest postcolonial and international writers of the contemporary world, whose work aims mainly at presenting his homeland, India, to the world. Rushdie is acutely aware of the realities of the postindependence India and, through the devices of historiographic metafiction, explores their effect on the human identity. The complexity of Rushdies work is given not only by the infinite and shifting aspects of the world he is describing, but also by the combination of literary and discursive devices. The unit presents Rushdies two best-known novels, Midnights Children and The Satanic Verses.

2.2. Competences On completion of UNIT TWO students will become familiar with important aspects of the work of Indias greatest literary voice and will discern some aspects of culture and history that are reconstructed in a fictional way. Students will discern postcolonial themes and postmodern techniques, will identify motifs, intertexts and types of discourse, will be able to analyze fragments and make comments.

Study time for UNIT TWO: 3 hours

2.3. The Life and Work of Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) on 19 June 1947. He went to school in Bombay and at Rugby in England, and read History at King's College, Cambridge, where he joined the Cambridge Footlights theatre company. After graduating, he lived with his family who had moved to Pakistan in 1964, and worked briefly in television before returning to England, beginning work as a copywriter for an advertising agency. His first novel, Grimus, was published in the year 1975.

His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight's Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers' 19

Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award's 25-year history. The novel narrates key events in the history of India through the story of pickle-factory worker Saleem Sinai, one of 1001 children born exactly as India won independence from Britain in the year 1947.

The publication in 1988 of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, lead to accusations of blasphemy against Islam and demonstrations by Islamist groups in India and Pakistan. The orthodox Iranian leadership issued a fatwa against Rushdie on 14 February 1989 - effectively a sentence of death - and he was forced into hiding under the protection of the British government and police. The book itself centres on the adventures of two Indian actors, Gibreel and Saladin, who fall to earth in Britain when their Air India jet explodes.

Salman Rushdie continued to write and publish books, including a children's book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), a warning about the dangers of story-telling that won the Writers' Guild Award (Best Children's Book), and which he adapted for the stage. There followed a book of essays entitled Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991); East, West (1994), and The Moors Last Sigh. (1995).

The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published in 1999, re-works the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in the context of modern popular music. His novel, Fury, set in New York at the beginning of the third millennium, was published in 2001. He is also the author of a travel narrative, The Jaguar Smile (1987), an account of a visit to Nicaragua in 1986. Salman Rushdie became a Knight Bachelor for services to literature in 2007. This stirred numerous negative reactions in Iran and Pakistan. In 2008, his latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence (2008), was published and Midnight's Children won the 'Best of the Booker' Prize. The book was also turned into a play. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He mixes magical realism with historical fiction, and a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world. His two greatest works have similarities to works written from ancient times onward like Apuleius The Golden Donkey, 1001 Arabian Nights, Joyces Ulysses, Sternes Tristram Shandy.

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2.4. Midnights Children Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnights Children, opens the novel by explaining that he was born on midnight, August 15, 1947, at the exact moment India gained its independence from British rule. At the age of 31 he thinks that his body is beginning to crack and he is close to death so he begins telling his story to Padma, his faithful companion. Saleems story begins in Kashmir, thirty-two years before his birth, in 1915. There, Saleems grandfather, a doctor named Aadam Aziz, begins treating Naseem, the woman who becomes Saleems grandmother. He can only see the parts of her body that he treats through perforated sheet. He finally sees her face in 1918. They get married and move to Agra where they have three daughters, Alia, Mumtaz, and Emerald, and two sons, Mustapha and Hanif. Aadam becomes a follower of the optimistic activist Mian Abdullah, whose anti-Partition stance eventually leads to his assassination. Following Abdullahs death, Aadam hides Abdullahs frightened assistant, Nadir Khan. Nadir Khan falls in love with Mumtaz, and the two get married in secret. He runs away when Emerald, tells an officer in the Pakistani army about his hiding place in the house. Abandoned by her husband, Mumtaz agrees to marry Ahmed Sinai, a young merchant who until then had been courting her sister, Alia. Mumtaz changes her name to Amina and moves to Delhi with her new husband. Pregnant, she goes to a fortune-teller who tells her that her boy will never be older or younger than his country and claiming that he sees two heads, knees and a nose. After a terrorist organization burns down Ahmeds factory, Ahmed and Amina move to Bombay. They buy a house from a departing Englishman, William Methwold, who owns an estate at the top of a hill. Wee Willie Winky, a poor man who entertains the families of Methwolds Estate, says that his wife, Vanita, is also expecting a child soon. Amina and Vanita both go into labor, and, at exactly midnight, each woman delivers a son. Meanwhile, a midwife at the nursing home, Mary Pereira switches the nametags of the two newborn babies, thereby giving the poor baby a life of privilege and the rich baby a life of poverty. Feeling guilty, she becomes Saleems nanny. Saleem discovers that he can hear the voices of the other children born at midnight on the same day. The 1,001 midnights childrena number reduced to 581 by their tenth birthdayall have magical powers, which vary according to how close to midnight they were born. Saleem discovers that Shiva, the boy with whom he was switched at birth, was born with a pair of enormous, powerful knees and a gift for combat. Saleem undergoes a nose operation and loses his telepathic powers but gains a powerful sense of smell with which he can smell peoples emotions. Saleems entire family moves to Pakistan after Indias military loss to China. His younger sister, now known as Jamila Singer, 21

becomes the most famous singer in Pakistan. His entire family except Jamila dies in the war between India and Pakistan. During the air raids, Saleem gets hit in the head by his grandfathers silver spittoon, which erases his memory entirely. Relieved of his memory, Saleem is reduced to an animalistic state. He is used in the military but scared of the atrocities he sees he flees to the jungle of the Sundarbans where he regains all of his memory except the knowledge of his name. After leaving the jungle, Saleem finds Parvati-the-witch, one of midnights children, who reminds him of his name and helps him escape back to India. He lives with her in the magicians ghetto, along with a snake charmer named Picture Singh. Saleem is forced to marry Parvati after she becomes impregnated with Shiva. Parvati dies while Shiva captures Saleem and brings him to a forced sterilization camp. There, Saleem divulges the names of the other midnights children. One by one, the midnights children are sterilized, effectively destroying the powers that threaten the prime minister. Later, however, Indira Gandhi loses the first election she holds. Saleem goes to Bombay where he finds Mary who owns a chutney factory at which Padma stands guarding the gate. His story complete, Saleem decides to marry Padma, on his thirty-first birthday. Saleem prophesies that he will die on that day, disintegrating into millions of specks of dust. Salman Rushdie belongs to the postmodern and postcolonial literary currents. Postcolonial texts react to the discourses of colonization approaching issues of de-colonization or the political and cultural independence of people formerly subjugated to a colonial rule. In Midnight Children (1981), Rushdie writes about Indias transition from British colonialism to independence. The novel has been described as a postmodern, magic-realist novel as well as a historiographic metafiction, term invented by Linda Hutcheon. Rushdie is preoccupied with showing the relations and migrations between the East and the West. He uses postmodern devices like intertextuality and approaches postcolonial themes like: identity, memory, racism. Rushdie mixes the Eastern tradition with the Western one. As an Indian living in Britain and writing in English, he has experienced both cultures and enriches his works with elements from both. From the Eastern traditions he borrows the Indian story-telling techniques and traditional oral narratives. The book resembles 1001 Nights, one story developing into another, forming a chain. Fantasy, the supernatural, amazing and exotic scenery, strange traditions are all part of the storytelling package. Saleem, the first person narrator, is a modern Scheherazade. He uses magic realism, which is a category of Indian prose which combines fact and fiction and a multitude of myths which function as a background to some real historical facts. Padma plays the role of the listener, she listens to Saleems story and sometimes intervenes being skeptical about the fantastical accounts. This is another postmodern feature, as postmodern writers encourage readers to get involved in the narrative and give their own interpretations. Even if the events are altered by fiction, the names of the Indian political figures are real. Rushdie goes back and forth from history to fiction, from truth to lies. 22

Rushdie is influenced also by the Western tradition and the works of Cervantes, Swift, Melville, Joyce, Sterne. The story of Saleem and the manner in which it is told mostly resembles Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy. Both Tristram and Shandy sometimes fail to distinguish between truth and fiction, their memory plays tricks on them. They attempt to be perfectly objective but they realize they cannot. The resemblance between Saleem and Tristram is also evident through the size and aspect of the nose. The nose and the name are the ones which determine a childs destiny according to Tristrams father. They both write because they feel the imminence of death and both fall victims of history. Memory is a very important theme for postcolonialism and Rushdie links this theme to his use of intertextuality. In Damian Grants view regarding Midnights Children, he sees the novel as

a modern odyssey, an epic navigation through these alternative realities: myth and history, memory and document, moonlight and daylight; the reflections of art, the centripetal and centrifugal dynamics of the self; the babel of languages, the alternating (and competing) religious and political understandings of the world (Grant, 1999: 38).

Rushdie uses fantasy to produce intensified images of reality. Fiction must find ways of making reality more intense. A work of art does not have to be one hundred percent accurate as critics like E.L Doctorow schowed. Rushdie stresses the fact that the human mind and memory are subject to forgetfulness, they are not perfect and therefore there are errors in the narrative which make the prose seem more real. In his own essay, Unreliable Narration in Midnight Children, Rushdie stated:

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. (Rushdie, 1995:164)

Rushdie found one of the most interesting and original metaphors for history, what some may even consider a perfect metaphor. He compared history to pickle jars. History is various versions of reality preserved in jars (books) in which reality is destroyed according to the subjectivity of the narrator. The subjectivity of the reader adds a certain flavor.

Returning to the concept of magic realism where magical elements are explained like normal occurrences which allows the "real" and the "fantastic" to be accepted in the same stream of thought, this genre best suits the project of presenting India that is filled with belief in magic, myths and superstitions. Linda Hutcheon considered magic realism the point of conjunction between postmodernism and post-colonialism. The novel itself begins like a fairytale: Once upon a time suggesting a level of fantasy but it is joined by real historical events. Saleem is born at the stroke of midnight, August 15th when India acquires its independence. He and 1000 other children born 23

between midnight and 1 A.M possess magical powers. Saleem comes to stand for India itself; he is an embodiment of India. He possesses a big nose that is magical and proves to be a sort of device for telepathic powers with which he communicates with the other Midnight Children. Shiva, with which he is exchanged at birth is his diabolical other and an antagonist. He possesses great strength and has strong knees (their powers were prophesized before their birth). Saleems teacher tells him that his nose is like a map of India (which at that time included Pakistan and Shrilanka). From the beginning of the novel we find out that his body is splitting and cracking. This deterioration suggests Indias division. Although India escapes military British rule and is no longer assaulted from the outside, inner conflicts divide her Pakistan and Bangladesh become independent of India).

There is a battle between tradition and modernity, between the Orient who wants to keep its traditions and the Occident who attacks the Orient with globalization and consumerism which prove more powerful than military attacks. The women like Naseem are keepers of tradition, the ones who transmit the stories and the ancestral wisdom. Aadam tries to impose Western values on Naddem but does not succeed. Another keeper of tradition is Tai, the boatman, a relic of what India was and possibly will never be again. He is one of the last who live according to the old sayings and who tries to keep the young from being perverted by the West. Tai seems to be as old as time itself. When Aadam asks him how old he is, he answers:
I have watched the mountains being born. [] I saw that Isa, that Christ, when he came to Kashmir. It is your history I am keeping in my head. Once it was set down in old lost books. I once met an officer from the army of Iskander the Great (Rushdie, 1995: 98)

On the opposite side, those who wish to trample upon the traditionalism sustained by these few keepers of tradition, there are the former colonizers who still leave their mark upon India as well as some Indians like Aadam who not only give up traditions but even lose their faith in God. Methwold, a rich Englishmen sells his house to Saleems family but while they are living together they have to adopt a British way of life. Goonetilleke notices Methwolds duplicity and shrewdness when it comes to the transfer of social and political power. Through his harsh demands
Methwold is only attempting to control India through imposing Western patterns of culture and, consequently, behavior on the power elite of post-Independence India. Actually, the subtext has it that power has been transferred to those already inclined towards the West, the Anglicized Indians. Methwolds buyers agree to accept his terms and even follow his routine regarding habits such as the cocktail hour because they were of a cast of mind already predisposed to such manners. Imperialism does not end when the imperialists leave. (Goonetilleke, 1998: 26)

The Midnight Children could embody what is good about India and represent Indias hope but none of them except Saleem recognizes his mission so Indias last hope dies, as they are all sterilized and 24

degraded (most of them join the circus and Saleem is used in the military like a dog for his exceptional nose). Saleem which represents the hero, a Christ-like figure has the fate of rescuing India but he fails and Shiva, his nemesis that is like an evil twin brother wins. The double-headed child that is foretold to Saleems mother is an allegory of the divided India and of its two religions, Muslim and Hindu. Apart from the themes of history and memory, another major postmodern as well as postcolonial theme is that of identity. Saleems identity is very unstable, as is Indias identity, perpetually changing. The ones he thought were his parents are not. He is in fact the son of an Englishmen, therefore a hybrid. He loses his memory and then regains it, his body literally cracks and tears up (he loses part of his finger, part of his scalp, his nose is operated), disintegrates as does Indias. At different times in the novel he is called different names. Identity proves an impure condition. As Naseems body is first seen by Aadam only through a perforated sheet, only certain parts visible, so only glimpses of the real India may be obtained. We only have the illusion that we see everything. In the end, Saleem abandons the path of Indias savior and wants to follow his own path and leave his own life and search for his true identity, a quest that many characters of postcolonial novels undertake. However, Saleem knows that he will soon disintegrate after having attempted to carry the burden of his country. With the MCC (Midnight Childrens Conference), Saleem militated for plurality and diversity but the nations desire for singularity or puritywhether of religion or culture wins and breeds violence and intolerance. Through this allegorical novel filled with magic and imagination, Rushdie beautifully depicts Indias condition prior to and especially after obtaining Independence showing that power divides a nation whether it is unjustly exercised from the outside or the inside. However tormented, the oppressed will always find a way to maintain their roots and fight for their beliefs and hope for a better future.

2.5. The Satanic Verses

The Satanic Verses (1988) tells the story of Gibreel Farishta who rises from being a pauper in Bombay to a popular filmstar playing Hindu deities in Bollywood mythologicals. The humor in the novel commences when Gibreel refuses to make love to his female admirers with the elephant snout on, which he has used as a prop for playing Lord Ganesha in a movie and which his fans have come to fancy. He complains that an acting career in Bombay is quite less of acting and much more of frantic travel between studios.

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It also tells the story of the misplaced Saladin Chamcha, who develops an English accent so refined and immaculate that he lends his voice to British radio shows. He shuns his father who loathes books and had sent him away from Bombay to study in Britain. He returns after a long period of absence only to find his town has changed tremendously.

On his return trip to UK, Saladin Chamcha meets Gibreel Farishta who has absconded in order to meet his flame Annie Cone, the Mount Everest conquerer whom he courted in Bombay. The plane gets hijacked and all but the two protagonists of the novel - Chamcha and Farishta - are dead. The two are washed ashore on the waves of the English Channel, only to find that there has been a major change of roles. Gibreel suffers hallucinations of being an archangel, while Saladin is transformed into a chimera representing the devil.

Saladin miraculously recovers from the transmogrification and plots his revenge against Gibreel for refusing recognition and help when Saladin was led into custody by policemen. He plots the murder of Annie Cone at the hands of the suspicious and jealous Gibreel Farishta himself. In the climax, Gibreel shoots himself when he realizes what a mistake he hascommitted.

As mentioned above, Rushdie borrows from both the Eastern tradition and the Western one. Whereas Midnight Children resembles more Sternes masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, The Satanic Verses has many influences, Rushdie being inspired by many great authors beginning from Antiquity to modernism. In Damian Grants view upon analyzing The Satanic Verses he finds striking resemblances to various literary masterpieces:

[] The Satanic Verses does indeed have intriguing resemblances, not least in the nature of the disintegration against which the characters are forced to struggle in order to survive, and the disconcerting doubleness and reversibility of the discourse. [] parallels may be found within it [] the Bible and the Koran, the Indian epics, Sufi texts, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, Dickens, Bulgakov, Beckett and of course Joyce himself. Not to mention the cinematic tradition of three continents, and a representative swathe of contemporary (that is to say, 1980s) British, Indian, and other cultures. (Grant, 1999: 72)

Grant notices the resemblances between A City Visible but Unseen (chapter in The Satanic Verse) and Wandering Rocks (section in Ulysses). In Rushdies novel we have Saladin Chamcha who explores Thatchers Britain. From the point of view of the plot, of what happens in the narrative, we have a similar situation in Apuleiuss The Golden Ass In both stories the main hero metamorphoses into an animal and both return to their normal selves once they realized their faults in life. Rushdies humor also resembles that of Apuleius. The subject of transformation is presented in a fascinating way by the imaginative author of The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie takes his cue from 26

the literary style of magic realism by transforming his characters into mystical creatures in an otherwise ordinary, non-magical setting. The transformations of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha are not only magical, they are symbolic as well as both men have previously been judged by their outward appearances in life.

Grant also finds similarities with T.S Eliots Wasteland. In his masterpiece, Eliot presents a decayed London where nature is under decay and people themselves are corrupt and depraved.

From the point of view of the split personalities of the characters, Grant draws a parallel with Louis Stevensons Dr Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde where we can see how one person metamorphosizes from good and evil, from human to animal. Many have found Stevensons tale to exemplify Freuds theory of the unconscious. Freud divided the mind into the conscious mind or ego and two parts of the unconscious: the id or instincts and the superego. He used the idea of the unconscious in order to explain certain kinds of neurotic behavior. In his theory, the unconscious refers to that part of mental functioning of which subjects make themselves unaware. For Freud, the unconscious was a repository for socially unacceptable ideas, wishes or desires, traumatic memories, and painful emotions put out of mind by the mechanism of psychological repression. Hyde comes to represent mans unconscious and what Dr. Jeckyl does is give life to his darkest instincts and turn off what would have censored his instincts in society. All humans have a dark side which they strive to keep hidden. Again, because of the use of intertextuality and borrowings from Western and Eastern culture, The Satanic Verses is a postmodern novel in its narrative technique and literary devices.

The Satanic Verses, like Midnight Children also belongs to the large umbrella of postcolonial literature. The book is a study in alienation, loss of identity inside migration. The Satanic Verses is about identity, alienation, rootlessness, brutality, compromise, and conformity. It describes the experience of migrants, disillusioned with both cultures: the one they are in and the one they join. Rushdie confirmed the fact that the book is not about Islam but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay.

The same Damian Grant states that the novel is difficult having all the characteristics of a postmodern writing. The themes dealt with are: personal and national/ethnic and the relationship between good and evil. The novel refers to racism and ethnic discrimination:

The Satanic Verses is a novel bristling with difficulty. This is due not so much to the cloud of controversy that has settled over it, as to the complexity of the novel itself, which makes the most disinterested reading a challenge. This complexity is no mere provocative, postmodernist top dressing but arises from the nature and intensity of the metaphysical speculation that lies at the heart of the work. There is a dense, nuclear fusion of

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ideas, grouped around the nature of modern identity, personal and national/ethnic; the relationship between our instinct for good and evil; the implications of this for our understanding of human disposition and potentialities; the nature of the reality within which we are required to live out our lives. (Grant, 1999: 71)

Although the two main characters are Indians who have adopted the western set of values and mentality, they still have to deal with the authorities discrimination and aggressiveness. Saladin, even from a young age rejected the Indian set of values imposed upon him by the community and din not like Indias superstitious nature. After living in England for five years, he believes that going back from West to East would be a regression. Both his father and his mother, Nasreen are against him picking up Western values. Five years after he is sent to Britain, Saladins mother dies. His father remarries another woman which also bares the name of Nasreen. Saladin and his father cannot get along and his father sees his son as a freak who has nothing in common with his homeland. Saladin finds spiritual comfort in Zeeny Vakil, like Saleem found in Parvati. She works in a hospital (The Breach Candy Hospital) and has a more integralistic view when it comes to judging Indians. She doesnt forget that she too is Indian and that be they good or bad they are all her compatriots and moreover human beings entitled to have a place of their own under the sun. With the help of Zeeny, Saladin embarks on a journey of self-discovery, a journey to rediscover his roots. The search for ones identity in a confused world is very popular in postcolonial literature.

Later on in the novel Rushdie tries to make a description of Mecca seen as a perverted city. Unfortunately it is no longer a holly city but a decadent and corrupt one ruled by businessmen. This is one of the issues which have made the Islamic fundamentalists condemn the writer. Just like in Eliots Waste Land, the world depicted here has lost everything that was sacred. The book is entirely symbolic and represents an initiating journey into ones traditions and customs. Both Gibreel and Saladin traded their Eastern culture for the Western one and chose a different identity so they could fit in a new world. In search for fame they actually managed to exile themselves from their country and their roots. Zeeny is the only one who sees this.

In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie uses the magic realism as he did in Midnights Children. The world that he creates is a world where history, dreams, magic, religion, superstitions meet. His characters are part of two worlds: a real one and an imaginary one, they are transformed from man to animal, Gibreel suffers hallucinations of being an archangel, while Saladin is transformed into a goat representing the devil especially through the horns it posesses. From friends they turn into enemies. Grant identifies in the structure of the book images typical of Indian and Western folklore, but also images based on the Koran and the Bible and relates the structuring of the chapters to magical realism as well: 28

[] the structure of the novel, in its nine sections, and Gibreels role as time traveller (and something more) between them. It has been observed that this novel about disintegration and reintegration is itself divided via its odd-and-even-numbered sections. The first four of the odd sections, I to VII [] take place in London, while the last, IX, is set in Bombay. The four even sections [] contain the magical or dream material. Section II (Mahound) tells the story of the original revelation to the prophet (including the notorious episode of the satanic verse themselves); section IV, (Aiesha) begins with a brief encounter with a sinister Imam who resembles Khomeini in exile, before moving on to the story of the girl Ayesha, who lives on butterflies and proposes a pilgrimage from Pakistan to Mecca (simply walking into the sea); section VI (Return to Jahilia) relates the story of the establishment of Islam itself, and the power-broking that goes on in the interests of the Idea; while section VIII, (The Parting of the Arabian Sea) recapitulates the outcome of Ayeshas pilgrimage. The key structural (and psychological) feature is that it is Gibreel, as archangel specifically, angel of the recitation, he who dictates the word of God to the prophet who dreams the other, magical narratives. And the handling of the interface between the two texts, two levels of reality, is the supreme test of Rushdies skill as a narrator. (Grant, 1999: 74)

When the two characters fall down from the plane and are metamorphosized they still attempt to explain everything rationally having acquired the Western rationalistic thinking by asking different questions. The characters will have to learn to live with the strange and inexplicable, just like the reader has to accept the conventions of magic realism. The transformation from human to animal is not only physical but social. and it depicts the cruel realities orientals have to endure before being accepted by the western society. Where Gibreel and Saladin end up the world is very much aware of the supernatural and treats it as if it were ordinary. After they are taken to the police and interrogated, they are taken to a hospital where apparently people have also been transformed into animals:
But now he was becoming aware of many other sounds, as unsettling as the first. It seemed to him that he could hear all sorts of animal voices: the snorting of bulls, the chattering of monkeys, even the pretty-polly mimicsquawkc of parrots or talking budgerigars. []His nose informed him that the sanatorium, or whatever the place called itself, was also beginning to stink to the heavens; jungle and farmyard odours mingled with a rich aroma similar to that of exotic spices sizzling in clarified butter coriander, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamoms, cloves. (Rushdie, 1989: 217)

When Saladin tries to convince the policemen that he is a British citizen they dont believe him and even after they confirm the truth, they still discriminate against him. He thus comes to realize that his father was right. However hard he may try to integrate in the western society he will always be an outsider. This is tied to the main theme of the novel that of alienation and loss of identity through migration. What Rushdie attempts to show is the difficulties and hardships the Indians and any other formerly colonized state goes through in postcolonial times, how hard it is for them to maintain their identity in a world suffering from massive globalization and capitalism. Despite being colonized, the Indians have not given up their culture and their religious beliefs. Rushdie shows what is beautiful 29

both in the Orient and the Occident but also what is to be condemned in both and he does this masterfully, being one of the greatest postcolonial writers of our time.

2.6. Salman Rushdie as a postcolonial writer

Salman Rushdie belongs to the great postcolonial current. In his novels, he deals with issues related to the experience of the Indians who were former colonized by the British Empire. His characters attempt to articulate their identity and reclaim their past in other terms than the colonial other. Postcolonialism being related to postmodernism, Rushdie uses postmodernist techniques. He uses intertextuality in both Midnights Children and The Satanic Verses. He borrows both from Western tradition and from his own roots, Eastern tradition. He is inspired by artists such as Apuleius, Sterne, Joyce, T.S.Eliot, and Stevenson. He refers both to the Bible and to the Koran. Although The Satanic Verses was attacked by the Islam because of his mention of the satanic verses and what Islamic leaders considered as blasphemy to their creed, his novel is not in fact about Islam but about migration and metamorphosis, the search for identity, about London and Bombay.

His novels have been termed magic-realist because in them he mixes reality with dreams, the natural with the supernatural. In magic-realist novels the reader accepts a certain convention that enables him to rethink the world in a manner in which the supernatural is deemed not only possible but it is in fact quite ordinary. By using folklore and myth from Indian culture, a narrative style that reminds of 1001 Arabian Nights, he makes his prose exotic and magical and breaks away from the traditional English narratives. He deals with important postcolonial themes like memory, identity, otherness, racism and ethnic discrimination in a comic, satirical manner that reminds of Swift. Magic realism is ideal to formulate the postcolonial allegory of mans destiny as being the nations destiny (thus in Midnights Children, Saleem is the embodiment of India and whatever rupture or degradation India suffers, he suffers also.

Rushdie does not critique Western thought and does not state that what Britain did to India is unforgivable. He tries to show both cultures in as objective a manner as possible. However, what he suggests is that the former-colonized individual must not lose his ethnic identity and must not lose touch with his Motherland. In order to find ones identity one must trace his roots and affirm his national identity. What characters like Saladin must learn is that they must take the best from both worlds: the culture and knowledge from the Western thought and the traditions, religion and beliefs (even if those beliefs include magic and superstition) of the Eastern thought. Indians must learn that they must not lose their origins.

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References:

Foucault, M. (1998) The Archeology of Knowledge in Rivkin, J. & Ryan, M.(eds.) Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers pp 421-428 Goonetilleke, D.C.R.A. (1998) Salman Rushdie. MacMillan, London Grant, D. (1999) Salman Rushdie. Northcote House, London Loomba, A. (1998) Colonialism/Postcolonialism. London: Routledge Rushdie, S. (1995) The Midnights Children. Vintage Rushdie, S. (1989) The Satanic Verses. Viking Penguin http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth87 (21.04.2010)

2.7. Summary Salman Rushdies fictional work displays a rare complexity and depth. His novels use postmodern devices and vision, magic realist elements, a diversity of intertextual references, historical background, and are informed by a postcolonial perspective. Midnights Children is a novel about the creation of the identity of independent India, a country that grows after the colonial experience with a lot of pain and turmoil. The Satanic Verses continues the exploration of human identity in connection with migration and metamorphosis, presenting both the world of London and of Bombay. The postcolonial issues Rushdie deals with are presented in a comic, often satirical manner, so that the novel also becomes a form of entertainment.

2.8. End of Unit Assessment Answer the following questions: What kind of novel is Midnights Children? What arguments can you bring for these categories? What were the literary influences that shaped this novel? Comment on the relationship between fantasy and reality in the novel. Identify the major themes. 31

How does magic realism function in Midnights Children and The Satanic Verses? What intertexts can one identify in The Satanic Verses? What kind of journey does Saladin embark on?

Example In the fragment below taken from the end of Midnights Children, the narrator, Saleem Sinai speaks about his self-assumed task of making a truthful account of the events marking Indias post-independence history. He chooses the metaphor of pickling, called chutnification in order to describe the process and implications of history writing.

My special blends: Ive been saving them up. Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standardsized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling time! I, however, have pickled chapters. Tonight, by screwing the lid firmly on to a jar bearing the legend Special Formula No.30: Abracadabra, I reach the end of my long-winded autobiography; in words and pickles, I have immortalized my memories, although distortions are inevitable in both methods. We must live, Im afraid, with the shadows of imperfection. What is required for chutnification? Raw materials obviously fruit, vegetable, fish, vinegar, spices. Daily visits from Koli women with their saris hitched up between their legsBut also eyes, blue as ice, which are undeceived by the superficial blandishments of fruit which can see corruption beneath citrus-skin. And above all, a nose capable of discerning the hidden languages of what-must-be-pickled, its humours and messages and emotions at Braganza Pickles I supervise the production of Marys legendary recipes; but there are also my special blends, in which, thanks to the powers of my drained nasal passages, I am able to include memories, dreams, ideas, so that once they enter mass-production all who consume them will know what pepperpots achieved in Pakistan, or how it felt to be in the Sundarbans believe dont believe but its true. Thirty jars stand upon a shelf, waiting to be unleashed upon the amnesic nation. (And beside them, one jar stands empty)

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The process of revision should be constant and endless; dont think Im satisfied with what Ive done! Among my unhappinesses: an overly-harsh taste from those jars containing memories of my father; a certain ambiguity in the love-flavour of Jamila-Singer Sometimes, in the pickles version of history, Saleem appears to have known too little; at other times too much yes, I should revise and revise, improve and improve; but there is neither the time, nor the energy. I am obliged to offer no more than this stubborn sentence: It happened that way because thats how it happened. To pickle is to give immortality, after all: fish, vegetables, fruit hang embalmed in spice-andvinegar; a certain alteration, a slight intensification of taste, is a small matter, surely? The art is to change the flavour in degree, but not in kind; and above all (in my thirty jars and a jar) to give it shape and form that is to say, meaning. (I have mentioned my fear of absurdity). One day, perhaps, the world may taste the pickles of history. They may be too strong for some palates, their smell may be overpowering, tears may rise to eyes; I hope nevertheless that it will be possible to say of them that they possess the authentic taste of truth that they are, despite everything, acts of love. One empty jar how to end?...Happily, with Mary in her teak rocking-chair and a son who has begun to speak? Amid recipes, and thirty jars with chapter-headings for names?... No, that wont do, I shall have to write the future as I have written the past, to set it down with the absolute certainty of a prophet. But the future cannot be preserved in a ja; one jar must remain empty I hear lies spoken in the night, anything you want to be you kin be, the greatest lie of all, cracking now, fission of Saleem, I am the bomb of Bombay, watch me explode, bones splitting breaking beneath the awful pressure of the crowd, bag of bones falling down down down, just as once at Jallianwala, but Dyer seems not to be present today, no Merchurochrome, only a broken creature spilling pieces of itself into the street, because I have been so-many too-many persons, life unlike syntax allows one more than three, and at last somewhere the striking of a clock, twelve chimes, release. Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, all in good time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privilege and the curse of midnights children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace. (pp. 459463, Salman Rushdie Midnights Children . 1995, London: Vintage).

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Unit Three: Alice Walker and the Changes of Identity

3.1. Introduction The work of Alice Walker includes novels, poems and short stories and it portrays the life of black women in a racist and sexist society. Her fame was established by the novel The Color Purple, whose character, a black woman in the South, meditates on about her roles as daughter, mother, wife and sister while writing letters to God. The novel impresses by her out of the ordinary experiences and by the several noticeable characters, chiefly black women, who interact and shape Celies life.

3.2. Competences The students will develop their understanding and ability to discuss issues related to black female identity as well as skills of interpreting narrative and discourse strategies used in The Color Purple.

Study time for UNIT THREE: 2 hours

3.3. The Life and Work of Alice Walker

Because Im black and Im a woman and because I was brought up poor and because Im a Southerner . . . the way I see the world is quite different from the way many people see it Alice Walker

The very year that The Color Purple embraced its place on the New York Times Bestsellers list for a period of over twenty-five weeks, was the year when Alice Walker turned out to be, in her own words, a name brand. The next year, in 1983, she also became the first Black woman to win the esteemed Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The fame and value of her art are largely due to her keen interest 34

in analyzing social relationships and, in a revolutionary way, challenging the assumptions of a patriarchal, unjust society.

An American poet, novelist, author of short story collections and several non-fiction pieces of work, Alice Malsenior Walker was born on February the 9th 1944 and raised in the state of Georgia. Her childhood was haunted by her mothers struggle against white plantation owners and their expectations that black children worked the fields as soon as possible. In 1952, as a consequence of a domestic accident, Alice Walker ended up permanently blind in one eye. This scar determined her to seek refuge in reading and poetry writing. After having successfully graduated from high-school, she avowed the value of her traumatic injury, as it allowed her really to see people and things, really to notice relationships and to learn to be patient enough to care about how they turned out. (World Authors 1995-2000. 2003. Retrieved 10 Apr. 2009, from Biography Reference Bank database) As a southern black living in a poverty-stricken rural community, she acknowledged that she acquired the skill of double vision. In Our Mothers Gardens she stated that: "Not only is the [black southern writer] in a position to see his own world, and its close community ... but he is capable of knowing, with remarkably silent accuracy, the people who make up the larger world that surrounds and suppresses his own."

Alice Walkers encounter with Martin Luther King while she was a student at Spelman College in the early 1960s determined her to become an activist for the Civil Rights Movement. Consequently, she attended several marches: in 1963, the famous March on Washington and on March 8, 2003 the march from Malcom X Park in Washington D.C. to the White House, on the eve of the Iraq War. Six years later, in March 2009, Walker did not remain numb to the controversial Israeli offensive of December 2008-January 2009 and along with 60 other female activists traveled to Gaza to offer support for those in need.

Another figure who influenced Alice Walker in becoming an activist was Howard Zinn, one of her professors at Spelman College. Following her call, she returned to the South and continued her activism campaigns. Later, in 1967, Walker married Mel Lenventhal, a Jewish civil rights lawyer, and two years later they had a daughter, Rebecca, a living, breathing, mixed-race embodiment of the new America that they were trying to forge. The marriage lasted for nine years. (Times article The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother)

Alice Walker began writing poetry when she was still in College. After two years at Spelman, she transferred to Sarah Lawrence, from which she received a B.A. in 1965. As an exchange student, she was granted a stay in Uganda but when faced with the opportunity to prolong her experience, she 35

decided that she could never live happily in Africa or anywhere else until [she] could live freely in Mississippi.

She began teaching and working as an editor for the Ms. Magazine, and later on she continued to write articles, including an article in 1975, about Nora Neale Hurston, a generous source of inspiration for her writing.

Already an author of poetry and short stories, Walker published her first novel in 1970, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, shortly followed by her second novel Meridian, in 1976. The novel dwells on the life and confrontations of the activist workers in the South, contextualized by the civil rights movement and echoing the writers own life experiences. The year 1982 witnessed the publication of her bestseller The Color Purple, followed by several other works amongst which can be mentioned The temple of My Familiar (1989) and Possessing the Secret of Joy, (1992). Poetry and Non-fiction writings also represent an important element of Walkers opus, stretching from 1968 to the present day.

3.4. Poetry, Novels, and Short Stories

We live in a society, as blacks, women, and artists, whose contests we do not design and with whose insistence on ranking us we are permanently at war. To know that second place, in such a society, has often required more work and innate genius than first, a longer, grimmer struggle over greater odds that firstand to be able to fling your scarf about dramatically while you demonstrate that you knowis to trust your own self-evaluation in the face of the Great White Western Commercial of white and male supremacy, which is virtually everything we see, outside and often inside our own homes.[] As black women and as artists, we are prepared, I think, to keep that faith. There are other choices, but they are despicable. On Refusing to Be Humbled by Second Place in a Contest You Did Not Design- Alice Walker

Alice Walkers writings portray the struggle of black people throughout history, and are acclaimed for their insightful and fascinating portraits of black life, in particular the experiences of black women in a sexist and racist society. She also coined a term for a black feminist womanist defined in the introduction to her book of essays, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose, as one who "appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility ... women's strength" and is "committed to [the] survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female." Walker has always praised black womens struggle with history for preserving their spirituality and creativity in spite of all adversities. In Our Mother's Gardens, Walker wrote: "We must fearlessly pull out of ourselves and look at and identify with our lives the living creativity some 36

of our great-grandmothers were not allowed to know. I stress 'some' of them because it is well known that the majority of our great-grandmothers knew, even without 'knowing' it, the reality of their spirituality, even if they didn't recognize it beyond what happened in the singing at church and they never had any intention of giving it up."

If one reads Saving the Life That Is Your Own: The Importance of Models in the Artists Life, one can get a glimpse of Walkers dislike for the pessimism which stretches over modern American literature. One explanation for this gloom of defeat hovering over American literature might be that American writers tended to end their books and their characters lives as if there were no better existence for which to struggle. This is where the African American writer intervenes, as he/she is used to struggling for freedom and therefore is able to triumph over the desolation present in so much modern literature.

Walker made her debut as a young, talented writer with the collection of poems which appeared under the title Once. It was not as acclaimed as her novels but it featured the precise wordings, the subtle, unexpected twists ... [and] shifting of emotions as Carolyn M. Rodgers depicted in Negro Digest.

The writer completed her first novel in 1967, entitled The Third Life of Grange Copeland, a novel which expresses what Walker meant by double vision, i.e. the ambivalence with which she envisioned Southern life. As Robert James Butler stated in Alice Walkers Vision of the South in The Third Life of Grange Copeland: Walkers ambivalence, therefore, is a rich and complex mode of vision, a way of seeing her Southern background which prevents her from either navely romanticizing the South or inducing it to an oversimplified vision of despair and resentment.

The three main characters of the novel - Brownfield, Ruth and Grange Copeland help constructing the authors richly ambivalent vision of the South. Brownfields and Ruths stories offer, on the one hand, an insight into how a black southerner can be enslaved and crippled, and on the other hand, the hope which results from rejecting the racist world. The story of Grange Copeland dwells on the family values and how they contribute to building ones sense of identity and belonging, after having suffered enough on account of the Southern cultures values.

Alice Walkers short stories focus on the issues of sexism and racism facing black women. According to Barbara T. Christian in Dictionary of Literary Biography, the collection In Love and Trouble (1973) introduces the stories of thirteen women who, against their own conscious wills in the face of pain, abuse, even death, challenge the conventions of sex, race, and age that attempt to 37

restrict them. Walker succeeded in presenting a variety of women mad, raging, loving, resentful, hateful, strong, ugly, weak, pitiful, and magnificent" - as they "try to live with the loyalty to black men that characterizes all of their lives (Our Mothers Gardens). In Alice Walker: The Achievement of short Fiction, Alice Hall Petry acknowledges that the love of In Love and Trouble may be between a woman and God (The Welcome Table); and it may even have an erotic dimension, as with the sexually-repressed black nun of The Diary of an African Nun who yearns for her pale lover, Christ (115). And granted, the love of In Love & Trouble is often distorted, even perverse: a father lops off his daughters breasts in part because he confuses her with his dead sister, whom he both loved and loathed (The Child Who Favored Daughter); a young black girl and her middleaged French teacher, the guilt-ridden survivor of the holocaust, fantasize about each other but never interact (We Drink the Wine in France); a dumpy hairdresser stabs and burns her husbands Black Power pamphlets as if they were his mistress: Trash! she cried over and over . . . I kill you! I kill you! (Her Sweet Jerome, 34).

In another collection, You Can't Keep a Good Women Down (1981), Alice Walkers choice of subject matter is considerably more poignant as it tackles issues like abortion, pornography and rape. This collection gathered different reviews and opinions from the critics. Alice Hall Petry argues that In stories like Porn A Letter of the Times, and Coming Apart, Walker attacks pornography, sadomasochism, and violence against women by discussing them: its a technique that many writers have used, but it can backfire by (1) appealing to the prurient interests of some readers, (2) imparting excitement to the forbidden topic, or (3) discussing the controversial subject matter so much that it becomes non-controversial, unshocking; and without the edge of controversy, these serious topics often seem to be treated satirically - even when that is not the case. At the same time, according

to Christian, Walkers stories perfectly illustrate the extent to which black women are free to pursue their own selfhood in a society permeated by sexism and racism.

The year 1976 witnessed the release of another novel, Meridian, a novel inspired by the writers personal experience as it retells the story of a black woman framed by the politics of the Civil Rights Movement. The novel portrays the personal evolution of the main character a young activist committed to revolution as she is faced with the question of motherhood. She becomes what it can be called Magnetic Meridian: a carefully located meridian from which secondary or guide meridians may be constructed. The novel was acclaimed by Marge Piercy in the New York Times Book Review as a fine, taut novel that accomplishes a remarkable amount, noticing that Walker writes with a sharp critical sense as she deals with the issues of tactics and strategy in the civil rights movement, with the nature of commitment, the possibility of interracial love and

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communication, the vital and lethal strands in American and black experience, with violence and nonviolence.

In 1982, Alice Walker published The Color Purple, the novel that has established her as a major modern American novelist. Shaped as a series of letters, the novel tells the story of Celie, a Black woman in the South, who meditates about her roles as daughter, wife, sister, and mother while writing letters to God. There are several noticeable characters, chiefly Black women, who interact with and shape Celies life: Celies sister, Nettie, who becomes a missionary teacher in Africa; Shug Avery, the Blues singer who becomes her salvation; Albert or Mr.___, the man to whom Celie is married; Sofia, the strong-willed daughter-in-law whose strength and courage inspire Celie. As the story unfolds, it is Celie who finds the knowledge to survive within this community of women.

Celies story portrays her evolution from subservience to independence. While at the beginning of the novel she displayed a submissive temperament, within the last few chapters she achieved a sense of self-respect. Consequently, she was able to declare boldly I'm pore, I'm black, I may be ugly and can't cook... but I'm here (214).

Another very important aspect of the award winning book is its masterful recreation of black folk speech which also helps construct characters identity. Borrowing the speech of uneducated rural Georgia country people in the first half of the 20th century, Walker confronted the critics who considered that way of speech to be exaggerated.

What is the meaning of the title? Purple can have different meanings: it can be interpreted as the color of royalty, flowers, or it can be the color of bruises and contusions. As Kate takes Celie when shopping for material for a dress, purple is Celies own choice: I think what color Shug Avery would wear. She like a queen to me so I say to Kate, Somethin purple, maybe little red in it too. But us look an look an no purple. Plenty red but she say, Naw, he won't want to pay for red. Too happy lookin. We got choice of brown, maroon or navy blue. I say blue. (20) This is how Celie is denied the color of royalty and is carried back to the blues.

Seven years later, in 1989, Alice Walker published another novel called The Temple of My Familiar, a romance of the last 500,000, as the writer herself asserted, or a mixture of mythic fantasy, revisionary history, exemplary biography and sermon" which is "short on narrative tension, long on inspirational message as J.M. Coetzee depicted it in the New York Times Book Review. The novel brings forth memories of ancestors and spirits from past cultures as they are revived through the voices of three men and three women. Bonnie Braendlin declares in Alice Walkers The Temple of 39

My Familiar as Pastiche that Walkers interrogatory text works to alienate us from our cultural and ideological complacencies; through a clash of ideologies and literary styles that risks scorn and rejection, Temple urges us to reflect upon our cherished beliefs and to consider other, countercultural responses to contemporary personal, communal, and global issues. At the same time, Brandlin acknowledges another dimension of the novel which - if read as a pastiche portrays a clash of traditional and contemporary ideas and ideology [which] revises a particular genre, namely the Bildungsroman.

3.5. Representative Postcolonial Issues Alice Walker: Yes, you would like to be understood by people. But I do understand that my worldview is different from that of most of the critics. . . . [T]hey are defending a way of life, a patriarchal system, which I do not worship. Interview, The Progressive, 1989

One of the most important aspects related to Alice Walkers literary work and especially her novel The Color Purple is the gift of voicing black women. This is the ultimate means in creating ones identity. Walker shows how the female other learns to trust herself and take action as an individual as a result of believing in women and their unity, in spite of sharing many husbands or even marrying someone they do not love.

The question of finding ones voice does not limit itself to black Southern women. If there are individuals who fail to find their own voice, we find out that there are also larger groups of people who face the same crisis. The people in Africa have been referred to as the savages for centuries because there was no African representative to speak in their support. This is what paves the way for misrepresentation, one of the most challenging issues present within postcolonial literature. One of Alice Walkers achievements in her best novel is an accurate description of the Olinka tribe, as an act of undoing the harm that had continued for ages in a colonial context.

Staying true to her womanist voice, Alice Walkers portraits of male characters are unique and challenging at the same time. She once declared: I wanted to explore the relationship between men and women, and why women are always condemned for doing what men do as an expression of their masculinity. Why are women so easily tramps and traitors when men are heroes for engaging in the same activity? Why do women stand for this? (OBrien 197).

When reading the following paragraph from The Color Purple where Mr. ___ addresses Celie, one cannot help thinking that Walkers men are indeed crude: . . . What you got? . . . You skinny. You 40

shape funny. You too scared to open your mouth to people . . . You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. Goddam, . . .. you nothing at all (186). Nevertheless, this is the grim reality portrayed by Walker in many of her writings.

As Louise H. Pratt notes in Alice Walkers Men: Profiles in the Quest For Love and Personal Values, perhaps one of the striking features of Walkers prose is that she displays a penchant for portraying her men indirectly. Many never speak; they are presented to the reader through the eyes of another personusually a woman. One can think of Samuel, the peripheral male in The Color Purple, described through the eyes of Nettie and presented in Celies letters and intended as a foil character to all the other men in the novel.

When reading Alice Walkers work, one cannot overlook one more important aspect: the connection with Africa, reminding us of the myth of the eternal return to ones origin. There is one element which connects all traditional theologies of Africa as well as the traditions of mysticism all over the world. Citing St. Pauls words in his Letter to the Galatians: and there are no more distinctions between Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female, but all of you are the one in Christ Jesus (Gal. 3:27), Joseph A. Brown declares that Walker has made a point of recreating the world in which men become complete only when they become female. Brown illustrates his assertion with a few examples from The Third Life of Grange Copeland, as Grange Copeland becomes the daughter of Ruth. In The Color Purple Mr. Albert allows his person to unfold only when Miss Celie begins to clothe him in her specially designed fashions, and teaches him to sew. Another aspect which is meant to portray the connection between the American black South and Africa is the general prospects which a woman would have in both places. These comprise the following phases: marriage, motherhood and home. Within such a submissive and domestic life, education holds a very insignificant place.

Alice Walker declared that she truly believes in change. Yet, who is supposed to make this change that so many black women long for, consciously or unconsciously? It may be the activist marching in the street for the Civil Rights Movement militating for social change; it may be a journalists words raising awareness and showing that words can words can be used to involve us in richer and more profound relationships with our community; or it may be the voice of the novelist who bears the same burden on her shoulders: to show us the way back to our essence.

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References

Walker, Alice (1983) In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Walker, Alice (1982) The Color Purple Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Leventhal, Rebecca (2008) The day feminist icon Alice Walker resigned as my mother http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article3866798.ece Walker, Alice ( 1990) The temple of My Familiar Pocket Books, New York. Smith, Arthur (1998) Alice Walker's Literary Beginnings Drawing Much From Her US, Southern Roots http://ezinearticles.com/?Alice-Walkers-Literary-Beginnings-Drawing-Much-FromHer-US,-Southern-Roots&id=2583560 Walker, Alice (1982) You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down: Stories Harvest Books. Walker, Alice (1990) Meridian Pocket Books, New York. Piercy, Marge (1976) Review of Meridian in the New York Times Book Review http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/10/04/specials/walker.html Walker, Alice (1970) The Third Life of Grange Copeland Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Bloom, Harold (eds.) (2007) Blooms Modern Critical Views: Alice WalkerNew Edition Infobase Publishing.

3.6. Summary Just like Toni Morrisons novels, the work of Alice Walker explores female identity especially in relation with abusing men. Walker is interested in displaying changes of identity especially due to female solidarity, as her best seller The Color Purple demonstrates. She also uses the styles of mythic fantasy and bildungsroman in her latest novel order to bring forth memories of ancestors and spirits from past cultures.

3.7. End of Unit Assessment :

Analyze the following passage from The Color Purple which is a discussion between Celie and Shug Avery, and point out the issues of identity and religion it focuses on: She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of foks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.

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Some folks didnt have him to share, I said. They the ones didnt speak to me while I was there struggling with my big belly and Mr.____ children. Right, she say. Then she say: Tell me what your God looks like, Celie. Aw naw, I say, Im too shame. Nobody ever ast me this before, so Im sort of took by surprise. Besides, when I think about it, it dont seem quite right. But it all I got. I decide to stick up for him, just to see what Shug say. Okay, I say, He big and old and tall and graybearded and white. He wear white robes and go barefooted. Blue eyes? She ast. Sort of bluish-gray. Cool. Big though. White lashes, I say. She laugh. Why you laugh? I ast. I dont think it so funny. What you expect him to look like, Mr.___? That wouldnt be no improvement, she say. Then she tell me this old white man is the same God she used to see when she prayed. If you wait to find God in churchm Celie, she say, thats who is bound to show up, cause thats where he live. How come? I ast. Cause thats the one thats in the white folks white bible. Shug, I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it. How come he look just like them, then? She say. Only bigger? And a heap more hair. Hoe come the bible, just like everything they make, all about them doing one thing or another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed? I never thought bout that. Nettie say somewhere in the bible it say Jesushair was like a lambs wool, I say. Aint no way to read the bible and not think God white, she say. Then she sigh. When I found out I thought God was white, and a man, I lost interest. You mad cause he dont seem to listen to your prayers. Humph! Do the mayor listen to anything colored say? Ast Sophia, she say. But I dont have to ast Sophia. I know white people never listen to colored, period. If they do, they only listen long enough to be able to tell you what to do. Heres the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or dont know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit. It? I ast. Yeah, It. God aint a he or a she, but a It. But what do it look like? I ast. 43

Dont look like nothing, she say. It aint a picture show. It aint something you can look at apart from anything else, including yourself. I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, youve found It. Shug a beautiful something, let me tell you. She frown a little, look out cross the yard, lean back in her chair, look like a big rose. She say, My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house. I knew just what it was. In fact, when it happen, you cant miss it. It sort of like you know what, she say, grinning and rubbing high up on my thigh. Shug! I say. Oh, she say. God love all them feelings. Thats some of the best stuff God did. You saying God vain? I ast. Naw, she say. Not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and dont notice it. What it do when it pissed off? I ast. Oh, it make something else. People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.,, It always making little surprises and springing them on us when us least expect. You mean it want to be loved, just like the bible say. Yes, Celie, she say. Everything want to be loved. Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk? Now that my eyes opening, I feels like a fool. Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr.___s evil sort of shrink. But not altogether. Still, it is like Shug say, you have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything atall. Man corrupt everything, say Shug. He on your box of grits, in your head, and all over the radio. He try to make you think he everywhere. Soon as you think he everywhere, you think he God. But he aint. Whenever you trying to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock. But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long, he dont want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it. (pp 201-204 Walker, Alice The Color Purple, 1985. Pocket Books, New York)

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MID-TERM ASSIGNMENT. 1. Draw a comparison between the way in which black female identity is presented in Toni Morrisons and in Alice Walkers fiction. 2. What relationships between the individual and the community/ society are revealed in the novels of Rushdie and Morrison?

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Unit FOUR: Zadie Smith and the Challenge of Multiculturalism

4.1. Introduction This unit presents one of the youngest postcolonial writers in contemporary Britain, whose very successful novels describe the multicultural context created in the complicated mega-city in the last decades. In such a context the construction of identity is a unique experience which involves multiple interactions and very often a confrontation with history and tradition.

4.2. Competences On completion of UNIT FOUR students will be able to identify the main themes of Zadie Smiths novels and discuss issues related to the multicultural society of one of the greatest cosmopolitan capitals today, like hybridity and mixed-race children.

Study time for UNIT FOUR: 2 hours

4.3. Life and work

Chiefly known as the author of the erudite and funny multicultural novel White Teeth, published in 2000, Zadie Smith was born in Hampstead, England, in 1975. Sadie, and later on known as Zadie, was the eldest child of an English father, and a Jamaican mother, much younger than her husband. Sadie had two younger brothers as the couple had three children together. Until their divorce, they had all lived in the northwestern suburbs of London, Kilburn and Willesden.

Sadie attended primary school at Queens Park and continued with secondary school in Cricklewood where she was an excellent student and loved learning, although she reportedly spent much of her time smoking marijuana. When she decided she wanted to attend university at Cambridge, her teachers pronounced themselves skeptical. Nevertheless, Sadie who changed her name to the more exotic-sounding Zadie in her teens succeeded in enrolling at Kings College, Cambridge, where she studied English literature. 46

Although she was one of the only two black women studying at Kings College, Zadie called her college experience the best three years of my life. At the same time, she regularly submitted entries to the May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories and to the competition for the Rylands Prize, a prestigious Kings College award for fiction. These endeavors led to the offer which brought about her success. Coming from a publishing house attracted by a story published in the May Anthology in 1996, the proposal gave birth to the best seller White Teeth. This novel indeed proved to be worthy of numerous awards, from the Whitbread prize for a first novel, the Guardian First Book Award, the Commonwealth Writers First Book Award, to the overall Commonwealth Writers Prize. Inevitably, Zadie Smiths astounding success turned her into an overnight celebrity. And celebrity became the theme of her following novel The Autograph Man, published in 2002. In a Newsweek interview the writer avowed her first confrontations with star worship: I remember once being in the street in London and watching a bus go by with my face on it, when White Teeth had just come out, and the way that made me feel. [] It was a sort of mixture of pumped-up feeling, false power, vanity and terror. And to multiply that, and to actively want it in your life, seems to me horrifying. Its about the emptiest thing on this planet, and I wanted to write about that.

In the same line of discussion and within the same interview, Smith also declared that Theres no accident in the fact that the breakdown in faith and the rise in the obsession with fame go side by side with one another I cant imagine what its like to be Tom Cruise. Its like a living death, its horrible. This grim view of celebrity and fame might have determined Smith to leave England in 2002 and study in the graduate program at Harvard University, teaching undergraduate classes and writing at the same time.

4.4. White Teeth

As a young writer, Zadie Smith literary work is still developing and expanding. She has become well-known for her three novels, White Teeth (2000), The Autograph Man (2002) and On Beauty (2005). Yet, these three differ widely in scope and style.

The winner of seven major literary awards and an international best seller, White Teeth tells the story of two families that attempt to overcome cultural issues in order to live happily. The novel is set within the districts of the capital city London, in Willesden and Kilburn, though it has glimpses of South Eastern Europe during WWII, and of the former colonies of Jamaica and Bangladesh.

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The most distinctive trait of this novel is the multiculturalism that thrives in the postcolonial British metropolis and what other way to illustrate it than the interaction between the native and immigrant residents, from different walks of life, races and religious backgrounds.

The story begins with the friendship between Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal during the Second World War and continues with depicting their lives further on. While Archie ends up marrying the much-younger Clara, a Jamaican girl whose mother is a devout Jehovah-Witness, Samad marries Alsana (she too is much younger than he is), a fresh immigrant from Bangladesh, as the result of an arranged marriage. Their children, Irie Jones, and respectively the twin boys Magid and Millat Iqbal are about the same age. Samad is haunted by the permanent conflict between his religious and cultural background as a Bengali Islamist and life in a corrupting and estranging postcolonial centre. Consequently, he decides to send his son Magid to Bangladesh, where he can develop properly under the teachings of Islam. Ironically, his decision turns against him as Magid becomes an atheist and devotes his life to science and Millat joins the fundamentalists as part of a Muslim brotherhood called the Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation (or KEVIN).

The lives of the two families interact with that of the Jewish-Catholic Chalfens, who consider themselves intellectual liberal towards the others but actually fail to respond to their children needs. The second generation of these three families discloses how one grows up in the heterogeneous, postcolonial London of the 1990s.

What is the meaning of the title of this novel? We are offered an explanation in the British Cultural Identities, by Mike Storry and Peter Childs: the novel charts the variety of molars, canines, incisors, root canals, false teeth, dental work, and damage that constitute the history behind different smiles. The commonsensical idea of the uniformity of teeth, which can also be divided into a host of shades from pearly to black, is as much a fiction in the novel as the traditional template of Britishness. And the writer adds: The prime examplars of traditional Englishness in White Teeth are a family called the Chalfens. The Chalfens are taken to be more English than the English because of their liberal middle-class values, and also their tendency towards empiricism. However, they are in fact thirdgeneration Poles, originally Chalfenovskys: not more English than the English, but as English as anyone else. Smith rings this theme of hybridity and cross-fertilisation through numerous extended metaphors, drawn from horticulture, eugenics, and the weather.

At a structural level, Smith is interested in constructing a web of parallels and correspondences among the four parts of her novel. It is a carefully controlled narrative, and close analysis demonstrates the extent to which Smith uses exterior structures such as chapter titles to govern its 48

presentation. Each of the four parts is named after a character and contains two important years in that characters life: ARCHIE 1974, 1945, SAMAD 1984, 1857, IRIE 1990, 1907, and MAGID, MILLAT, AND MARCUS 1992, 1999. Apart from the last section, which is different in a number of ways (perhaps because of its movement from present to future, rather than from present to past), there are numerous parallels among the sections devoted to Archie, Samad, and Irie. Each of the five-chapter sections begins with a similarly constructed chapter title: The Peculiar Second Marriage of Archie Jones, The Temptation of Samad Iqbal, and The Miseducation of Irie Jones (the final section shares this construction, beginning with The Return of Magid Mahfooz Murshed Mubtasim Iqbal); each includes a chapter title that concerns teeth: Teething Trouble, Molars, and Canines: The Ripping Teeth; and each includes a Root Canal chapter: The Root Canals of Alfred Archibald Jones and Samad Miah Iqbal, The Root Canals of Mangal Pande, and The Root Canals of Hortense Bowden.

In White Teeth, Smith demonstrates the important but fractured relationship between the past and the present, as her characters approach their relationship with history from various perspectives. At the same time, they are faced with the impossibility of escaping history or of living entirely outside its influence. Magid, for example, is essentially uprooted from his family and from his history, and he tries to construct an identity entirely separate from it. However, he is unable to escape their influence, as the novels final section finds him reunited with his twin brother and entangled with Irie. Samad views history as an accurate reflection of the present, and, accordingly, he spends much of his life trying to come to terms with the role of his family history in his own life. He feels that, if he changes public perception of his traitorous great-grandfather Mangal Pande, he will become a better person. This unhealthy preoccupation with revising history can be seen in his attempts to rewrite the history of Pande: The story of Mangal Pande [] is no laughing matter. He is the tickle in the sneeze, he is why we are the way we are, the founder of modern India, the big historical cheese (188), and in his vicious defense of Pandes legacy from contemporary historians: Just because the word exists, it does not follow that it is a correct representation of the character of Mangal Pande. The first definition we agree on: my great-grandfather was a mutineer and I am proud to say this. I concede matters did not go quite according to plan. But traitor? Coward? The dictionary you show me is old these definitions are now out of currency. Pande was no traitor and no coward (209). Samad is unwilling to discard this history because he believes fervently that history shapes the present; if Pande is a traitor and a coward, then he might also be one: What I have realized, is that the generations, [] they speak to each other, Jones. Its not a line, life is not a line this is not palm-reading its a circle, and they speak to us. That is why you cannot read fate; you must experience it (100). The narrator sympathetically summarizes Samads position: When a man has nothing but his blood to commend him, each drop of it matters, matters terribly; it must be jealously 49

defended (212). Samads perspective on history can also be seen in OConnells, the place where he and Archie meet regularly to discuss their lives: Everything was remembered, nothing was lost. History was never revised or reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed (160-61). OConnells serves as a neutral place for Archie and Samad, one filled with its own shared history and one in which outside history cannot touch them: Simply because you could be without family in OConnells, without possessions or status, without past glory or future hope you could walk through that door with nothing and be exactly the same as everybody else in there. It could be 1989 outside, or 1999, 2009, and you could still be sitting at the counter in the V-neck you wore to your wedding in 1975 or 1935. Nothing changes here, things are only retold, remembered. Thats why old men love it (203).

The younger generation in White Teeth takes a very different approach to history. Irie Jones is faced with her fathers obstinate obscurity Im a Jones, you see. Slike a Smith. Were nobody my father used to say: Were the chaff, boy, were the chaff (84) and her mothers embarrassing secret which Irie discovers upon kicking over the glass holding her false teeth. This provides enough reason for Irie to want to escape the clutches of her past: This was yet another item in a long list of parental hypocrisies and untruths, this was another example of the Jones/Bowden gift for secret history, stories you never got told, history you never entirely uncovered, rumor you never unraveled, which would be fine if every day was not littered with clues (314). The discovery of her mothers secret prompts Irie finally to cut ties completely with her parents and move in with her grandmother. When Irie moves in with her grandmother who represents a part of her past, she finds a wellwooded and watered place fresh and untainted and without past or dictated future a place where things simply were (332). She goes on to imagine this place in detail: No fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after apocalypse. A blank page (332). Samad and Irie hold opposing viewpoints regarding the importance of history in the present, but, in the novels final chapters, they both begin to accept the chaotic reality of things.

Alsanas words express the overall view of the novel: You go back and back and back and its still easier to find the right Hoover bag than to find one pure person, one pure faith, on the globe. Do you think anybody is English? Really English? Its a fairy-tale.

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Finally, the novel succeeds in presenting the city's enduring and emerging problems at the end of the twentieth century while simultaneously pointing to new possibilities and modes of transformation at the beginning of the new millennium. (Storry, Childs 2002:60)

4.5. The Other Novels

Zadie Smiths second novel differs greatly from her first one and it has received mixed reviews. Though in 2003 the novel was awarded the Jewish Quarterly Reviews Wingate Literary Prize, was not received as well as White Teeth by readers and critics. The story follows the progress of a Jewish/Chinese Londoner named Alex-Li Tandem, who buys and sells autographs for a living and is obsessed with celebrities. In the review which appeared in The Guardian, Alex Clark asserted that Alex-Li Tandem, the Chinese-Jewish north Londoner around whose travails The Autograph Man springs into life, is the embodiment of this narrowing process, this unwitting loss of authenticity, a man who "deals in a shorthand of experience", and who is "one of this generation who watch themselves". And he continues by declaring that If Smith was keen to shed the tag of grand chronicler of multiculturalism, then it was perhaps unwise to give her protagonist such an unusual pedigree, but Tandem, whose most noticeable affinity to his Chinese half is his neurotic loyalty to a herbal doctor in Soho, and whose lack of observance is the despair of his friends Mark Rubinfine and Adam Jacobs, is a character made deliberately ill at ease with his background and his surroundings, and who spends much of the novel trying to free himself from their claims upon him.

The structure of the book is straightforward, presented in the voice of a third-person omniscient narrator. The author decided to break the story up into two sections: one with chapter headings based on the ten sections of the Kabbalah, the other with chapter headings based on the practice of Zen. The reader is faced with the interweaving of many layers of meaning and symbolism which have already been attached to the elements of the Kabbalah, not to mention those Smith adds through her creation of a Kabbalah specific to the life of Alex-Li. Overall, to borrow Alex Clarks words, In The Autograph Man, Zadie Smith comes close to demonstrating that she might not be a comic novelist at all, and showing readers that there is another side to her.

While a fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute, Zadie Smith released her third novel On Beauty (2005) which was inspired by one of Elaine Scarrys essays, On Beauty and Being Just. Described by an article in the Guardian as a transatlantic comic saga, the novel tells the story of two intercultural families: the Belseys, living in the fictional university town of Wellington, and the Kipps family, living in Britain. Here too Smith tackles the issue of multiculturalism but her style is

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meant to pay homage to E. M. Forsters Howards End, set in the pre-World War I England and depicting the collision of two antithetical families.

On Beauty was praised to be that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left, as Frank Rich declared in The New York Times Book Review.

Zadie Smith is also known for having written valuable essays such as On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair, Love, Actually, Fail Better, culminating with a collection of essays published in 2009 Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. Smith herself declared in an interview: I think the biggest change in me and my writing is the realization that in the end my best work might be nonfiction. Im writing criticism now and I feel so much more confident and happy about it. It allows me to express my passion, which is really other peoples fiction. I find it hard to express anything really personal to me in the fiction: Im too self-conscious. But maybe that will change.

4.6. Representative postcolonial issues

In White Teeth, Zadie Smith demonstrates the problems of living in a postmodern world, as her characters constantly collide with each other in the pursuit of meaning and truth and struggle with their attempts to find happiness in a fractured and chaotic world.

The main theme from which all the other ones develop in Zadie Smiths novels is multiculturalism. White Teeth depicts the lives of a wide range of backgrounds, including Afro-Caribbean, Muslim, and Jewish. Just as the quote at the beginning of the novel states, What is past is prologue. Characters constantly attempt to control their interaction with history, viewing it either as wholly predetermined if I understand my history, then I will understand my present and future or as wholly arbitrary if I ignore my past, then it will not be able to influence my present and future.

Samad begins to understand that history alone cannot sustain him; we see this first in his reluctant recollection of a story from when he first arrived in England, as he acknowledges this embarrassing incident in which he used his bleeding thumb to write his name into the stone beneath a park bench: A great shame washed over me the moment I finished, [] because I knew what it meant, this deed. It meant I wanted to write my name on the world. It meant I presumed. Like the Englishmen who named streets in Kerala after their wives, like the Americans who shoved their flag in the moon. It was a warning from Allah. He was saying: Iqbal, you are becoming like them (418-19).

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Furthermore, the issue of multiculturalism brings about the question of hybridity and here we can refer to mixed-race children or second generation of immigrants. The connection between race and hybridity is pretty tight as the latter is predicated on racial distinction. All these concepts represent barriers that separate people and determine the nature of human relations. At the same time, they compellingly influence ones identity. For instance, we can refer to Irie Jones or Millat in White Teeth, but we can also mention the Belsey children in On Beauty.

Zadie Smiths work already stands in the same line as famous contemporary writers such as Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie. She is concerned with how people come to terms with their identities and with the past, with how individuals fit into society, and with metaphysical questions about the nature of existence. For her, writing represents a total art which involves human beings, their own personal ethics, their consciousness, their sensibilities.

References

Smith, Zadie (2000) White Teeth. Hamish Hamilton, London. Smith, Zadie (2002) The Autograph Man Hamish Hamilton, London. Smith, Zadie (2005) On Beauty, Hamish Hamilton, London. Storry, M. and P. Childs (2002) British Cultural Identities, Routledge. Clark, Alex (2002) Signs and wonders. The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2002/sep/14/ Rich, Frank (2005) Zadie Smiths Culture Warriors. The New York Times Book Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18rich.html Susheila Nasta (eds.) (2004) Zadie Smith with Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. Writing across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk, Routledge.

4.7. Summary Zadie Smiths most notable contribution to postcolonial literature is the depiction of the multicultural urban background of postcolonial London that creates specific problems of identity among various generations of immigrants. The interaction between the native and immigrant residents from different walks of life and races is presented together with the pursuit of meaning and truth in a chaotic and fractured world.

End of Unit Assessment: Comment on the multicultural background created in the novel White Teeth and its implications on the characters identity.

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UNIT FIVE:

J. M. Coetzee: Denouncing the Brute Force

5.1. Introduction The South African writer focuses on colonial struggles and conflicts specific to the apartheid system, but not only, touching upon central postcolonial themes such as identity and the construction of the other, the power of language for colonizing nations. His novels involve a subversive discourse even when the characters remain silent and the protagonists evolution represents a subversive potential to the named or unnamed empire that forms the background.

5.2. Competences On completion of UNIT FIVE students will enlarge their knowledge of the themes, spaces and forms of colonialism and its subversive potential. They will be able to detect subtle fictional devices by which the novelist depicts some of the deadliest totalitarian regimes.

Study time for UNIT FIVE : 2 hours

5.3. Life and work J M Coetzee was born on the 9th of February 1940 in Cape Town, South Africa. His mother was a primary school teacher and his father was trained as an attorney, but he rarely practiced. When his father lost his job for the government because his opinions differed from those of the apartheid government the family moved to Worchester. As a child he received his education in Cape Town and Worchester. He continued his studies at the University of Cape Town and graduated in 1960 and 1961 with honours degrees in English and mathematics respectively. J M Coetzee worked until 1965 as a computer programmer in England while he carried his studies concerning Ford Madox Ford. He married Philippa Jubber in 1963. They had two children, Nicolas and Gisela. In 1965 he entered the University of Austin in Texas, USA which he graduated three years later with a Ph.D. in English, linguistics, and Germanic languages. From then on he embarked on a career as a university professor and joined over the time such universities as the State University of New York in Buffalo, the 54

University of Cape Town, the State University of New York, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, Stanford University, and the University of Chicago. Coetzee has also been active as a translator of Dutch and Afrikaans literature. He has been living in Australia since 2002 and he is a professor at the University of Adelaide. His debut in fiction is marked by the publishing of Dusklands in 1974. The novel was followed by In the Heart of the Country (1977), Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), Disgrace (1999), Slow Man (2005), Diary of a bad year (2005) and Summertime (2009). His work also includes two fictionalized autobiographies

Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) and several collections of essays: Lives of Animals later included in Elizabeth Costello (2003), White Writing (1988), Doubling the point (1992), Stranger Shores (2001) and a study on literary censorship Giving Offence (1996). Both his fiction and non-fiction works have been translated in several languages. His works were well received by the public and critics alike. He won numerous literary prizes among which James Tait Black Memorial Prize (in 1980 for Waiting for the Barbarians), The Booker Prize for Fiction (twice: in 1993 for Life & Times of Michael K and in 1999 for Disgrace), Commonwealth Writers Prize (in 2000 for Disgrace). In 2003 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

5.4. Waiting for the Barbarians Waiting for the Barbarians is set in a colonial outpost somewhere at the margins of an unnamed empire. Beyond the walls of the outpost lies a barren land where the barbarians are said to live. The central administration of the empire considers that the empire is under imminent threat from the rebellious barbarians. So an enigmatic Third Bureau sends colonel Joll to investigate this threat. It is the meeting with this cruel representative of the empire that sets the protagonist of the novel, The Magistrate, into a spiritual journey that results into the discovering of the other as a human being. Unable to turn a blind eye to Jolls methods of torture and fascinated by the enigmatic presence of a barbarian girl whom he takes under his protection, the Magistrate finds himself in a position that is at odds with the general policy of the empire. While colonel Joll returns to the capital, the Magistrate embarks on a difficult journey over the barren and unfriendly territory that lies outside the walls of his fortress in order to restore the girl to her tribe. In the meantime, imperial troops arrive in the town. Upon his return to the outpost he is treated as a traitor, incarcerated and tortured beyond the point of endurance. As the imperial army retreats as a result of some defeat suffered in one of its expeditions, the Magistrate re-assumes his position as ruler of the fortress.

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The novel can be easily read as an allegory of colonial and postcolonial relations. On one side there lies the unnamed empire as a sign of colonial oppression, on the other side there are the barbarians, barely visible except some tortured beings and the group the Magistrate meets. Between the two lies - sometimes as if suspended between two worlds - the Magistrate whose character insures the meeting point between the two other sides from positions different from those of the colonial oppressor and the oppressed colonized. The empire remains unnamed and distant throughout the book. It is represented by an obscure institution, the Third Bureau, which seems to have as a focus the security of the empire as it dispatches troops to fight the barbarians. Besides this it remains an abstract structure reminding of Kafkas castle precisely because it seems to be an unreachable place which is made visible by its clerks, but whose inner structure remains obscure. The Empire plunges into absurd by fighting with an unseen enemy that seems to be mostly constructed out of rumours and its imperial nightmare of collapse than on real bases. Its material representation is embodied in colonel Joll, a perfect example of a heartless torturer. His methods of extracting the truth from the barbarians by means of torture reveal the whole empire as one based on constriction, fear and de-humanization of the other. In his hands the prisoners become the withholders of truth unwilling to deliver it until their bodies are crippled and their spirits crushed. Colonel Joll does not even stop to ask himself whether the ones he tortures are real enemies. Despite the fact that the Magistrate tells him that those interrogated cannot offer any information, he pursues the truth out of their mutilated bodies for the mere reason that they have been marked by the imperial power as enemies. By means of his human agents the empire, which in itself seems void of any humane agency, performs an action of de-humanization over the barbarians. They are the unknown and frightening other, the threat that lurks at its borders. It is very representative for this colonizer-like attitude the scene in which the barbarian prisoners are taken to the centre of town and whipped after the word enemy has been written over their bodies. To name them as such is to extract them from the category of the human and plunge them into a category of the sub-human devoid of any identifying personality. They are appropriated by the empire entirely and transformed from living breathing human beings into a product of the imperial framework of mind. It is what Durrant (1999: 456) calls Jolls lesson in blindness. The naming of the scene is quite appropriate: the imperial citizens are blinded by Jolls staging. The humanity of the people in front of them is no longer evident. They remain mere representatives of the abstract category of the enemy for whose safety or fare treatment they do not have to bother. Despite this continuous dehumanizing action from the part of the empire the barbarians are not subdued as a whole to a stereotypical image. While their side of the story is not told and they are an elusive presence despite some mutilated bodies, they do not remain confined to the image built by the Empire. The real barbarians, the ones that everyone dreads never show up. They only appear in 56

the rumors that determine the raids of the army and in the stories told by the settlers and the soldiers. They are as elusive as ghosts. Cast into an invented scenery, the barbarians themselves seem to be an invention. As T. Kay Norris Easton (1995: 591) observes [i]t is very appropriate that Coetzee invents his imperial landscape in Waiting for the Barbarians, for it represents both the artificial (i.e. imaginary) war that the 'barbarians' are engaged in and the artificial possession by Empire of their land. The artificiality of the power that the empire has over the barbarians is illustrated by the barbarians the Magistrate encounters in the mountains. It is here that a reversal of positions occurs: the Magistrates men are tired and worn out by their travel through the harsh climate of the desert. In stark opposition to them the barbarians seem quite comfortable with their environment and they are in an obvious position of control. The chief of the barbarians acts as if he is the master of the land, the owner of law-making as he takes a piece of silver for the horse he accepts not to take. The scene points to the representatives of the imperial power and ultimately to the Empire itself as ridden by self-deception: their power is not limitless. As the novel finishes there remains an unanswered question: who are the barbarians? If we are to think of the barbarians as the ones who are not citizens of the empire, the mysterious other that populates the land beyond the known borders of the empire, than their image is built out of silences, out of the unsaid. Neither the barbarian girl, nor the captured barbarians or the barbarians in the mountains offer the reader a very individualized distinct image. They are mostly the product of an imperial rumour of imminent destruction. They are like ghosts that appear in the nightmares of children, ghosts to which any crime can be attributed (from theft to rape) because they are not real presences that could defend themselves. The armys expeditions only deepen these impressions: the barbarians are said to attack at night and therefore they remain unknown. This image of the barbarians as absence is emphasized by the title of the novel which alludes to Becketts play Waiting for Godot. Like the elusive Godot the true barbarians that the empire awaits do not make their appearance. But the novel posits the reader with an ethical issue as well: are the real barbarians the shabby prisoners or the ghostly appearances in the desert or it might be that the true barbarians lie at the very heart of civilized pretences? Who is to be considered more barbaric? The barbarians at the borders with their simple way of life or the likes of colonel Joll who represent the civilised imperial world but resort to torture without giving it a second thought? This ethical dilemma it is voiced in the fabric of the novel itself by the Magistrate. The Magistrate is the leader of the small town and he seems to be as separated from the barbarians as he is from his own Empire. He has hardly set foot outside the walls of his town or been to the capital city. As the novel progresses his condition as a mere representative of the empire changes. Unable to remain untouched by the screams of the prisoners the Magistrate discovers an ethics based on the certainty not of ones own existence but on the existence of (unknowable) others (Durrant, 1999: 57

452). Samuel Durrant argues that [t]he Magistrates crisis of consciousness/ conscience is ultimately a crisis of knowledge (Durrant, 1999: 455). Prompted by this crisis the Magistrate takes under his care a barbarian girl. He washes her body and tries to cure her wounds in a gesture that seem to be the improvised ritual of domineering guilt, the confused gesture of a confused man (Howe, 1982). His attraction to the barbarian girl remains even to himself inexplicable. He washes and caresses her as if in a stupor. His actions are even less explainable for his fellow representatives of the empire. As stated before his actions might be directed by an ethical dilemma: just because the empire is labelled as civilised it does not mean necessarily that it does not display a core barbarism in its violent actions. Stephen Watson (1986: 378) proposes another interpretation:
[] all Coetzee's major protagonists are colonizers who wish to elude at almost any cost their historical role as colonizers. All of them (and this would include even Jacobus Coetzee) are wrought to a pitch of desperation in their efforts to escape the intolerable burdens of the master - slave relationship. Eugene Dawn, Magda, the magistrate, even the medical officer in Life and Times of Michael K are all of a piece in their single hunger. If, indeed, there is a dominant moral impulse at work in Coetzee's novels, it is to be found in the insatiable hunger of all his protagonists for ways of escape from a role which condemns them as subjects to confront others as objects in interminable, murderous acts of self-division. If there is also a pessimism in them, it is because the majority of these characters (Michael K being the exception here) beat against the shackles of their historical position in vain.

Indeed the Magistrate as an official representative of the empire should not fraternize with the enemy or be concerned with its condition. The fact that he objects to torture and performs such a humbling action as washing the girls feet shows that he has stepped over the boundaries of his colonial position. By looking after the girl he proves that his perspective has changed. The girl is no longer just an enemy of the empire who needs to be crushed, but a human being. The fact that he later returns her to her tribe shows that he has learnt to respect her as a human being, that he has passed beyond a colonial perspective and allowed her to exist outside colonial assumptions of what her life should be like. His attachment to the girl is a first step in distancing himself from the barbaric ways of the empire. But his knowledge of the other is not yet complete: Although he takes her into his bed, she remains intractably foreign; although her life has invaded his he is unable, at least at this point in the novel, to intrude into hers 1 (Durrant, 1999: 454) Only when the magistrate experiences torture is he completely submerged into a position similar to that of the barbarians. He ceases to be a representative of the empire and becomes joined in suffering with those the empire attempts to crush under its domination. The end of the novel finds the Magistrate back at the lead of his town meditating how he had wanted to leave outside the history of the empire in the atemporality of the barbarians. The fact that he is restored to his official position shows that such an enterprise is not

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possible. What is possible is to acknowledge the existence of the other, to understand that the other may be something else than the product of your own imagination.

5.5. Disgrace A somehow similar discovery is made by David Lurie the protagonist of Disgrace. The novel is set in post-apartheid urban and rural South-Africa. David Lurie is a professor at Cape Town University who leaves a solitary life indulging in meetings with a prostitute named Soraya and writing about Byron. As their relation breaks, Lurie starts having an affair with one of his students, Melanie (an affair that he himself recognizes as not being entirely consented from the girls part). The girl files a complaint with university authorities and, as Lurie is unwilling to provide an adequate defence for his actions, he is fired. He goes to spend time with his daughter, Lucy, at her farm where she runs a kennel and grows flowers and vegetables for the market. Here he meets Petrus, a servant who bought land from his daughter and Bev Shaw a woman who takes care of stray dogs. His daughter is gang-raped by some Africans and he is beaten and set on fire by the same gang. Despite him insisting Lucy refuses to report the rape to the police even when one of the rapists is disclosed as one of Petrus relatives. Lurie begins helping Bev Shaw at the animal shelter to euthanize the dogs. In the final scene of the novel Lurie chooses to euthanize the cripple dog that kept him company while writing the lines for Byrons mistress. The novel can be read as a political text, a post- apartheid work that deals with the difficulties confronting the white community in South Africa and with some of the choices available to them. To use with irony the ironic title of one of Coetzee's novels, the period of Waiting for the Barbarians is over. (Sarvan, 2004: 26). As a matter of fact, in this novel the feared barbarians of the nightmares of the settlers in the previously discussed novel seem to have emerged as the rapists of Lucy Lurie. Despite the fact that the author does not make for himself a point in depicting historical realities and relations, still his novel presents, as Kimberly Wedeven Segall (2005: 40) states, a dark depiction of South Africas transitional tremors, for the legacy of apartheid does not dissipate overnight. Coetzee is not a political writer, but his novel depicts the consequences of this post-apartheid South Africa where relations have been reversed and the white people are no longer either the absolute masters, or safe from dangers. What has changed besides politics in this post-apartheid country are not just the political relations, but the relations between the citizens of the country as well. The dynamics between master and servants have changed. Petrus the dog-man, as he calls himself, at the beginning of the novel, is no longer a mere servant subjected to the whims of his masters: As for Petrus, he is not some hired labourer whom I can sack because in my opinion he is mixed up with the 59

wrong people. Thats all gone, gone with the wind (Coetzee, 1999: 133). As the novel progresses the roles of the white and the black male are completely reversed. Symbolically, David becomes the dog-man who helps Bev put dogs down and who carries their bodies to the incinerator. Petrus is quite aware that things have changed deeply in this new South Africa and this is proved by the fact that he offers to protect Lucy in exchange for her land. But for this to happen she would have to become, at least in name his wife, which means to become subordinated to him. It also means that Lucy would have to abandon the European tradition that interdicts bigamy and join Petruss other wife. She would have to become native. And Lucy, whom David Atwell (2001: 866) identifies as heir of a settler history, attempting to live lightly, as a post-industrial-age hippie, on the simple routines and pleasures of rural life, but who cannot avoid becoming the representative of settlerdom's long history of appropriation, seems to contemplate the idea of doing so in order to protect her unborn child and the little she has left. Atwell considers this ending not a plausible one and suggests a different reading than a literal one:
it is best thought of as allegorical, representing the extreme case in the working out of what it might mean for a white person to take on an African identity - certainly it is difficult not to see this as a repudiation of facile assertions by whites of their Africanness. Furthermore, Coetzee's reprisal of the postcolonial trope of the expectant mother-of-the-nation makes the nation (if such this is) the producer of a bitter, and ambiguous legacy. (Atwell, 2001: 866)

In this post-apartheid country relations between people are not easily negotiated and the reversal of master-slave roles leaves people like David and Lucy amazed at the violence that can be directed against them. Lucy wonders herself But why did they hate me so? I had never set eyes on them. (Coetzee, 1999: 156). She might indeed had not set eyes on them before, but numerous white people set eyes on them before and pushed them aside from the making of history. The attack on Lucy can be explained as an attempt to turn history around, to turn the oppressive master into the oppressed slave. As her father points out It was history speaking through them (Coetzee, 1999: 156). As stated before, Lurie himself, like the magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians, is embarked into a journey towards the discovery of the other. First he is presented as a man that takes a womans body as something that is rightfully his because in his opinion beauty does not belong to itself. While he motivates his actions against Melanie as directed by Eros he seems to be oblivious of the implication of a white man rapping an African girl. One of the members of the committee investigating him points precisely to such implications when she says that his deed is inscribed in the long history of the exploitation of which this is part. (Coetzee, 1999: 53). Against this violent background, David Lurie treads his own path from the man who rapes a woman under Romantic pretences to a man that is capable, after experiencing his daughters rape, to inhabit a womans being by centring his musical composition around the old mistress of Byron. It is a counter-movement to 60

his earlier investment in careless masculinity (Atwell, 2001: 867) He abandons his position of colonial and masculine superiority and faces the frailty of his own condition. Like the Magistrate he becomes able to acknowledge the presence of the other. While Melanie and Soraya are just objects of his passion, Lucy and Theresa (Byrons mistress) are subjects whom he can identify as independent beings with a life of their own besides his whishes and desires. While his life does not return to the (artificial) calm that the Magistrate experiences, still he experiences a calming of the passion or revolt. It is as if he abandons fight along with the corpse of the dog that kept him company while he wrote his musical composition. Atwell (2001: 867) identifies in this open ending the presence of grace: if grace is available at all, it will lie in simple acts of love that will enable the world's creatures to die graciously. Following Atwells interpretation we might assume that the ending suggests a possible resolution to the unsolved conflicts of post-apartheid South Africa: hate on both sides needs to be abandoned so that both white and black can build a life together. Charles Sarvan (2004:29) sees this ending through the prism of Buddhist thought: Lurie's act of giving up the dog is symbolic of relinquishment, of a surrendering of attachment, attachment and desire from which, according to the Buddha, come suffering and sorrow. In giving himself up, and in giving himself to, Lurie finds himself. And therefore he finds his way form disgrace to grace as he achieves tranquility. 5.6. Postcolonial issues in Coetzees novels In depicting the struggles and conflicts that the colonist colonized relationship involves, J. M. Coetzee has managed to touch upon such postcolonial themes as identity and the construction of the other, silencing and the power of language for colonizing nations. His novels involve a subversive discourse even when the characters remain silent or precisely because of that. The barbarians in Waiting for the Barbarians do not get to tell their own story. But the horrible rumours related to them are rendered absurd precisely by their absence. The imperial discourse is thus exposed as artificial and potentially unrealistic. While the barbarians and the empire do not truly meet face to face in the course of the novel, individual characters belonging to these large categories have direct interactions. The implication here might be that individuals could and should leave outside ideologies, that fabricated images need to be tested against the fabric of reality. The same may be told of Disgrace. The confrontation there is not necessarily between entire human categories (although colonizer/colonized systems of values, ideas, fears and frustrations are always at play), but between individuals and the ways they report themselves to such systems of belief. David Lurie is not only blind to the implications of raping Melanie from a political point of view, but from a general human point of view as well. As the story unfolds he becomes both aware of the history that determines three men to rape his daughter, and of the human implications of his actions. His daughter chooses to remain silent about her rape, to keep this piece of history to herself (thus 61

refusing to substantiate the colonial myth of the white woman raped by black men), the barbarians in Waiting for the Barbarians are reduced to silence by the empire but this very silence becomes a destabilizing point for the imperial power. Both their silences are subversive in relation to a colonial discourse.

References Atwell, D. (2001). Coetzee and Post-Apartheid South Africa. Journal of Southern Studies. Volume 27. Number 4. December 2001).online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823418. (12/03/2010) Coetzee, J. M. (1999). Disgrace. London. Secker & Warburg Coetzee, J. M. (2005). Asteptandu-i pe barbari. Bucuresti. Humanitas. Durrant, S. (1999). Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee's Inconsolable Works of Mourning in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999) http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208885. (12.03.2010) Howe, I. (1982). Stark Political Fable of South Africa. New York Times. 12 April 1982. online: http://www.nytimes.com/1982/04/18/books/coetzeebarbarians.html?&pagewanted=all (20.04.2010) Norris Easton, T. K. (1995). Text and Hinterland: J. M. Coetzee and the South African Novel in Journal of Southern African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 4, Special Issue on Paradigms Forming and Reinformed (Dec., 1995). Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2637210 (12. 03.2010) Sarvan, C. (2004). Disgrace: A Path to Grace? World Literature Today. Volume 78. January - April, 2004). online: Number 1. South African Literature: online: African

http://www.jstor.org/stable/4 0158353. (12.03.2010)

Watson, S. (1986). Colonialism and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee. Research in African Literatures. Volume 17. Number 3, Special Focus on Southern Africa. Autumn, 1986. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3819221. (12/03/2010) Wedeon Segall, K. (2005). Pursuing Ghosts: The Traumatic Sublime in J. M. Coetzees Disgrace. Research in African Literatures. Volume 36. Number 4. Winter 2005. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3821381. (12.03.2010) 62 Available online: Available online:

Gikandi, S. (2003). Encyclopedia of African Literature. London. Routledge http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Coetzee.html http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-bio.html http://www.humanitas.ro/jm-coetzee http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth108

5.7. Summary This unit focused on a significan voice in todays fiction, a Nobel Prize laureate, whose writings deal with extreme experiences in colonial or postcolonial settings. The characters understanding enlarges as a result of these incursions into unknown mysterious places and their identities are shaped by facing the other and learning to live with them. 5.8. End of Unit Assessment a. Comment on the devices used by Coetzee in order to expose the imperial /colonial power and discourse. b. Compare the changes undergone by the protagonists of the two novels discussed in this unit.

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UNIT SIX:

Jean Rhys: Voicing the Silent

6.1. Introduction This unit introduces the work of a writer of Carribean origin, who attempted to trace the unknown history of colonalism in this area. Her best-known novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, tells the story of a marginal character from a famous Victorian novel, Jane Eyre, from a different point of view, Bertha Mason is in fact born with another name, and her compelling story is a testimony of the colonial practices of the nineteenth century.

6.2. Competences The analysis accompanying the study of this unit enables the students to discern the macro-structural narrative strategies that operate subversively upon the established institutions and the literary canons of the Empire.

Study time for UNIT ONE: 2 hours

6.3. Life and work

The Dominican writer Jean Rhys was born on 24 August 1890 in Dominica. She was the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother. She started her education in Dominica and at the age of sixteen she moved to England where she joined the Perse School for Girls in Cambridge. Later she entered the Academy of Dramatic Art. She had various jobs: chorus girl, mannequin, an artists model. In 1919 she married Jean Lenglet, but later they divorced. Later she remarried Max Hamer. As an adult she only returned once to Dominica before she died on 14 May 1979 in England.

She published her first short story Vienne in 1924 while actually leaving in Vienna. She was encouraged in her literary pursuits by Ford Madox Ford who wrote an enthusiastic introduction for her debut book, The Left Bank, a collection of short stories published in 1927. After this she wrote 64

and published: Quartet (1928), After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). After the publication of these books she slowly disappeared from the attention of the public to such an extent that she was presumed dead. In 1966 she published Wide Sargasso Sea which won the Royal Society of Literature Award and the W. H. Smith Award the same year. It was followed by a collection of short stories, Sleep It off Lady in 1976 and an unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, was published after her death in 1979.

6.4. Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea tells the story of Bertha Mason, the mad woman in Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre. The novel is structured in three parts, each having its own narrator: young Antoinette, Antoinettes husband (Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre) and the mature Antoinette locked in the attic at Thornfield. Antoinettes story begins a few years after the Emancipation Act of 1833 with her as a child leaving at Coulibri estate. Her father died a few years prior to the beginning of the narration and his estate has known a constant degradation. At Coulibri Antoinette lives with her mother, Annette, and her apparently mentally challenged brother, Pierre. The mother spends her time riding horses (at least until they are killed) or pacing the glacis, rather then taking care of her children. Young Antoinette spends most of her time alone or in the company of her mothers servant, Cristophine, a woman from Martinique. She tries to befriend Tia, a black girl, but their friendship soon ends in bitter words. Annette remarries. Mr. Mason restores the property to its original beauty, but one night the black people gathered around the house set it (it is not clear whether accidentally or not) on fire. Pierre is badly hurt in the fire and eventually he dies. Hurt by a stone thrown by Tia, Antoinette spends some time with her Aunt Cora, while her mothers condition deteriorates so severely that she rejects her own daughter and becomes mad. Eventually Antoinette becomes a pupil at a school in a convent. The next we hear about her she is a newly wed in her honeymoon on an island. Soon the relations between her and her husband, who was forced into this marriage by his father and elder brother, deteriorate to such an extent that he decides to move his wife to England and lock her up at Thornfield. The book ends as Antoinette escapes from her room and sets fire to the mansion.

Written as an attempt to give a voice to the mad Bertha Mason of Jane Eye, the novel displays a series of issues that touch upon such postcolonial themes as the relation between colonizer and colonist, shadeism, and patriarchal relations that mirror colonial relations.

The novel sets into opposition two different kinds of colonizers. One the one hand there are the English newcomers such as Mr. Rochester and Mr. Mason, on the other hand there are the white 65

Creoles like Antoinette and her mother. They are the widow and daughter of an ex-slave owner, Mr. Cosway who lost his fortune most probably as a result of the Emancipation Act of 1833 which meant that free work hand was no longer available. As a result of their financial problems they become estranged from their neighbours and a subject of ridicule to their black servants. Antoinettes family no longer belongs to the class of the masters, but on the contrary they are cast aside as they are not white enough to continue being part of the ranks of the white colonizers, neither are they black enough to be accepted by the black Creole community. The separation from the white settlers is stated from the very beginning of the novel: They say when trouble comes close ranks, and so the white people did. But we were not in their ranks (Rhys, 1997: 5). Later on in the novel Mr. Rochester thinks of his new wife Creole of pure descent they may be, but they are not English or European either. (Rhys, 1997: 40), marking visible thus once again the difference and distance between white Creoles and English people. As Graham Huggan very well observes
Rhys's white Creoles are caught between a world from which their ancestors came but which now has little meaning for them (the fictive "England" of Wide Sargasso Sea) and one into which they were born but from which they are now violently expelled (the protected enclave of a privileged minority in their native Caribbean islands). (Huggan, 1994: 654-655)

The position of the white Creoles like Antoinette has changed radically: she is cut off from her white peers and cannot go back to a metropolitan centre that she might wish to see, but which remains utterly unavailable because of the constrictions that Rochester imposes on her, but she can neither integrate within the community of black locals who view her as nothing else than an outcast of her privileged world who deserves nothing but scorn.

The later position is proved by the interactions with Tia, the black girl that Antoinette tries to befriend. She calls her white cockroach (an insult repeated later in the novel by another black servant, Amlie). Tia further comments upon Antoinettes situation as follows:
She hear all we poor like beggar. We ate salt fish no money for fresh fish. That old house so leaky, you run with the calabash to catch water when it rain. Plenty white people in Jamaica. Real white people, they got gold money. They didnt look at us, nobody see them come near us. Old time white people nothing but white nigger now, and black nigger better than white nigger. (Rhys, 1997: 10)

It should be observed that Tias little speech bears a mentality not too much distanced from that of the white colonizer: superiority is given by financial status and being part of the right social group. It is after all a matter of the right shade: black nigger better than white nigger (Rhys, 1997: 10). The comparison between the two social groups points to the fact that colonial habits have changed to such a degree that black citizens can affirm their identity with pride. The conflict between white 66

Creoles and black natives finds its peak in the burning of the Coulibri mansion. While Antoinette confused about her position reaches to Tia for support, all she receives is a stone thrown at her head. The scene underlines the confusion that the protagonist experiences concerning her lingering in between white and black. At the same time the burning of Coco the parrot alludes to Antoinettes dream in the end of the novel in which she sets fire to Thornfield.

The same pride to affirm ones independence is present in Cristophines reply to Antoinettes husband: This is free country and I am free woman (Rhys, 1997: 103). Cristophines words document a change of condition: the black woman is no longer a person subjected to the whims of a colonizer, but a person who can assert her right to freedom. Although in her article Carine M. Mardorossian claims that the natives discourse is more effective by appealing to silence and, as far as Cristophine is concerned The moment she explains herself to [Antoinettes husband] and appeals to his humanity on Antoinettes behalf, he sets in motion the hegemonic legal and medical systems which will allow him to successfully silence both her and Antoinette (Mardorossian, 1999: 1079). Carine M. Mardorossian seems not to pay attention to the sentence quoted above, which asserts so powerfully Christophines right to an opinion. Otherwise C. M. Mardorossian is right when she observes that obeah (the religion/witchcraft that Christophine practices) is not that effective against colonial power as a practice in itself. On the contrary
Wide Sargasso Sea compels its critics to question facile celebrations of negro traditions as authentic sources of subversion of alternative power and foregrounds instead the reality of imperialist control. It reminds us that celebratory readings of Obeah might actually obscure its appropriation by the dominant power as grounds for punishment (Mardorossian, 1999:1079)

The fact that there are hints at a previous imprisonment of Christophine because of obeah comes as a support for the critics point of view. C. M. Mardorossian makes a very useful observation for the understanding of the novel when she observes that it is precisely the reproduction of the colonial discourse on obeah that causes disruptions in the life of the colonizer. Rochester does not have any unmediated experience related to obeah and all he knows about is what he read in an English book about obeah and zombies. He has no grasp of the native point of view on the matter and constructs his reaction to this native belief on a colonial perspective entirely. To these mediated experience is added the silence of the black natives in regard to the subject. It is after all their silence, their unwillingness to pronounce on the subject that allows Rochester to dwell in his colonial view without grasping the true meaning of obeah to the natives. The colonial discourse is actually subverted by its own self-sufficiency. Colonists have tried to silence the colonized other up to the point that all that remains is its own colonial image of the colonized. Now silence becomes a weapon in the hands of the natives: the unexplained is perceived as dangerous and determines unexpected reactions from the part of the colonizer. As Mardorossian (1999: 1081) observes 67

Rochester ultimately loses control and carries out the colonizer's worst fear, namely of "going native," when he runs to the ruined house to counteract the effects of obeah on its own terms. What disarms him is thus not the obeah witch's "agency" but the stereotypical notions of a Eurocentric text he cannot question combined with and exacerbated by "native" silences he cannot interpret. The Afro-Caribbean characters' conspiracy of silence/ignorance surrounding the practice of black magic enhances his paranoia and undermines colonial authority from within in a way that their speaking up against injustice cannot.

The colonizer is thus reduced to a disadvantaged position where its own discourse about reality is challenged by its very inefficiency. In this context the silence of the natives becomes an instrument of power. Still there are instances where speech can be subversive as well. One such example is that of Cristophine claming her freedom. Another might be that of Godfrey, the servant at Coulibri who
is giving his white creole employers some of their own medicine, coming up with clichs and denying differences ("The Lord make no distinction between black and white, black and white the same for Him") in order to evade responsibility for the horse's killing. (Mardorossian, 1999: 1083)

In such scenes the colonial discourse is exposed as being devoid of power as it becomes an instrument of its own subversion. And this kind of subversion acts against both representatives of the Empire: the newcomers from England and the white Creoles.

Another point of interest in the novel is represented by the relation between Antoinette and her husband. Neglected as a child, then rejected by her mother and raised at a nuns school Antoinette seems to cling desperately to her husband. The fact that at first he seems to be loving and caring in his actions towards her only deepens her confusion when he turns against her. He is obsessed with the purity of her origins - Creole of pure descent they may be, but they are not English or European either. (Rhys, 1997: 40) and with the history of madness in her family, but he fails listening her story. Antoinette attempts telling her own story in order to defend against what her supposed half brother, Daniel, has said against her. All she encounters is her husbands prejudice, who in front of her dismay and suffering triggered by his cheating decides to lock her up and hide her from the rest of the world. Her position of instability between a white and black community that neither accepts her is only accentuated by Rochesters rejection. In relation to Antoinette, Rochesters patriarchal position is in fact a mirroring of the colonist colonized relation. He has taken all her money, as no one bothered making any provisions for Antoinette herself. Moreover he has imposed his prejudices over their marriage. Coerced into a marriage he did not want he sees more and more in his wife a woman that he does not want as his wife as she truly is, but as he wants her to be. It is relevant here that after finding out more about her past he starts calling her Bertha. Like a colonist who has conquered he renames in order to mark possession. Antoinette denounces this as witchcraft: Bertha 68

is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, thats obeah too. (Rhys, 1997: 94). As obeah attempts at creating zombies out of people, so does Rochester attempt to empty Antoinette of her being and allow her to live only as his projection of what she should be like. In Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre the mad Bertha Mason is only mentioned as an object of dread, an element of disturbance for the quite life of the English protagonists. She is the menacing other that threats to disrupt the course of normal life, while Rochester seems to be the innocent victim of a greedy father. The fact that Rhys decides to tell her story acts as a means of subversion of the colonial power. She is no longer a silent other. She has a voice and a story outside those of the English characters. The fact that Rhys shows that Bertha is nothing but a name imposed by Rochester underlines the fact that the Brontes Bertha Mason is constructed under a colonial framework of mind. Rhys manages to show that behind a constructed image and a false name lies another story, the story of the postcolonial other. To this subversive device of pointing to the artificiality of names and of the stories they might carry another one is added. G. Huggan (1994: 653) observes that
Rhys's unnaming of Rochester neatly counteracts Rochester's self-empowering attempt to rename Antoinette. By renaming Antoinette (Bertha), and by re-inscribing her within the parameters of English fiction (Jane Eyre), Rhys's Rochester seeks to enhance his authority by sitting England as a locus of cultural value.

We as readers know it is Rochester, but by not naming him Rhys puts him on an equal position as Antoinette as a metatextual construction underling thus the artificiality of his own condition as character of the novel. From colonist master he becomes an artificial construct of an author who attempts to undermine his position as representative of colonialism and of a patriarchal system. G. Huggan (1994: 654) claims that the subversion of the patriarchal model is subversion of colonialism too:
her critique of patriarchy in the novel also contains within it a critique of colonialism. In challenging the "naturalized" system of colonial inheritance, Rhys also interrogates the "natural" process of filiation by which overseas colonies (such as Jamaica and Dominica) are pledged in the service of the home country (England). Rochester's position is of course an ambivalent one; caught between his duties as an authoritarian husband and as an obedient son, he is at once implicated within the system and victimized by it.

The equation of the two is right in the sense that they ultimately reproduce a similar pattern of power and dominance over a subdued other. Yet even if Rochester is to a certain extant a victim of the system, he never attempts to step outside the system. He merely hints at some point in the novel that the truth might lie in the dream-like world of Antoinette, but he never sets looking for her truth. What is left standing from his point of view is his patriarchal and colonial perspective. By contrast the reader is left with a more complete truth that includes the story of the other as well, of the true 69

victim of a patriarchal and colonial system that does not allow for the existence of the other outside its boundaries.

In the final scene Antoinette sets fire to Thornfield, thus liberating herself from the domination of her husband. The scene mirrors that in which the black Creoles have burnt Coulibri. Her downfall in life had started with a fire and it ends now in fire as well. If we are to refer back to Carine M. Mardorossians view that relates the burning of Coulibri to the commitment to freedom of the black people, we can see that the same underling reason lies beyond Antoinettes gesture. For the imprisoned woman who is at the mercy of a husband who had never understood her and who wants to hide her forever the only possible solution is disappearance altogether.

But despite the protagonists tragic ending, there is still hope. The character is no longer the mad Bertha locked in an attic. She is a young woman with desires and aspirations, whose story deserves to be heard. And while she may remain oblivious to her own familys colonial role in the times of slavery, she herself becomes exposed to racial prejudices and reduced to a white nigger, not European enough for her husband. Jean Rhys has chosen not to save Antoinette from the flames of colonial Jane Eyre. But she has chosen to do something else: to allow her to tell her story.

6.5. Postcolonialist issues with Jean Rhys And while this in itself represents a subversion of colonial discourse as it destabilizes its position as unique truth, there are several other devices by which the colonial discourse is replaced by a postcolonial one. As stated before, Antoinette is caught between white and black and therefore between a colonists position and a native position. H. Adlai Murdoch (2003: 256) observes that By revealing and underlining the doubleness and instability in contemporary conceptions of social relations and "racial" categories, Rhys undermines our perception of both metropole and colony and of notions of belonging and exclusion. Her being a white descendant should make Antoinette a representative of the metropole, but she is more drawn to the native practices. She tries to befriend Tia and constantly relies on Christophine to such an extent that she tries to benefit from her witchcraft in order to win her husband back. By portraying her character in this way Rhys destabilizes notions of colonial racial separation of social groups and points to the fact that colonists themselves may go native and as a result she undoes the binary, hierarchical opposition of self and Other upon which the Victorian novelistic tradition was largely based, as well as its implicit, concurrent notions of social and cultural disjuncture. (Adlai Murdoch, 2003: 256). The colonist becomes engaged in the practices of the country he rules and may be subjected to influences from the part of native traditions and customs. The other is no longer an outsider whose behaviour cannot be assumed by the colonial master who looks upon it as something savage in need of being subjected to 70

the demands of civilization. The other and his system of thinking may become part of the colonist and seen as equally valuable and important. By pointing to the frailty of the colonial position, by showing how tones of skin make a difference when identity is concerned, by exposing the patriarchal system as similar in domination to the colonial system and last, but not least, by giving a voice to the mad Bertha of Jane Eyre so as she can show up as fully human, Jean Rhys manages to create a novel that parts with the colonial perspective and offers a postcolonial view of otherness.

References: Huggan, G. (1994). A Tale of Two Parrots: Walcott, Rhys, and the Uses of Colonial Contemporary Literature. Volume 35. Number 4. Winter, 1994. Available http://www.jstor.org/stable/1208702. (last accessed: 12.03.2010) DoubleMimicry. online:

Mardorossian, C. M. (1999). Shutting up the Subaltern: Silences, Stereotypes, and Entendre in Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea". Callaloo. Volume 22. Available online: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3299872 Rhys, J. (1997). Wide Sargasso Sea. London. Penguin Snodgrass, M. E. (2010). Encyclopaedia of the Literature of the Empire. New York. Publishing http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Search/QuickSearchProc/1,,Author_1000013645,00.html http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/imperial/carib/rhysbio.htm

Number 4. Autumn, 1999.

(last accessed: 12/03/2010)

Infobase

4.7. Summary The other version of Bertha Mason from Charlotte Brontes famous novel is a testimony of the colonial system and its effects upon identity in the Carribean area. Issues of hybridity, shadeism and colonizers attitude are involved in a richly contrived plot and yield a richness of anti-colonial meanings. 4.8 . End of Unit Assessment a. Analyze the strategies of naming, re-naming and not naming used by Jean Rhys. b. Analyze the symbolism of the novel. c. Analyze the stages of Berthas sense of identity and the relationships involved in creating it.

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FINAL ASSIGNMENT

Write a 1500 word essay with the title: Issues of colonizer/colonized identity and narrative and discursive strategies used by contemporary novelists in exploring these issues. Refer to at least four writers you have studied in this course.

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